arXiv AI

EGT-KG: Evidence-Grounded Typed KG Retrieval for Practical Scientific QA with Small Language Models

The paper introduces EGT-KG, an evidence‑grounded typed knowledge graph retrieval framework designed to enhance scientific question answering with small language models (SLMs). It compares three QA settings—standard Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) and two EGT‑KG variants (automatically generated and expert‑defined relation schemas)—using a six‑dimensional evaluation on a biopolymer‑bound soil composite literature benchmark. Results show that both EGT‑KG variants outperform vanilla RAG, with the llama3:8b model achieving a final score of 70.37 (+14.67%) and 68.82 (+12.14%) for the AS and ES variants, respectively.

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Lit3R: Retrieve-Relate-Read for Evidence-Grounded Question Answering over Scientific Literature

Lit3R is a system developed by tus-nlp for the LitTraceQA shared task, which focuses on evidence-grounded question answering over scientific literature. The system combines off-the-shelf retrieval, reranking, and large language model components without task-specific training, using an iterative retrieval process that merges BM25-based sparse and dense retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, and LLM verification, along with paper-to-paper expansion. In the official test set, Lit3R achieved a 4th place ranking on the leaderboard.

By Akira Ise, Kotaro Kumagai, Yuta Yamaguchi, Hisanori Ozaki, Yukio Uematsu, Ikuya Yamada
arXiv AI
3d ago

AquiLLM: Evaluating Faithfulness in Open-Weight RAG-LLM Systems for Scientific Research

arXiv:2609.16519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific research increasingly relies on large, heterogeneous data sources, motivating interest in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that...

By Bernie Boscoe, Srinath Saikrishnan, Vikram Seenivasan, Jack Stark, Andrew Lizarraga, Morgan Himes, Jonathan Soriano, PJ Allen, Tuan Do
arXiv AI
4d ago

Empirical Evaluation of Open-Source Large Language Models for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in ESG Domain

The paper evaluates seven open‑source large language models for retrieval‑augmented generation in the ESG reporting domain, using 498 real‑world ESG reports from EU‑listed companies and 100 synthetic QA pairs. Performance is measured with RAGAS metrics, showing strong retrieval scores but variable generation quality, especially in faithfulness and factual correctness. The results highlight significant differences across model architectures and underscore the need for domain‑specific fine‑tuning to improve factual accuracy.

By Motaz Saad, Anna Borrelli, Ivan Gentile, Kianna Kazemi, Francesco Piccialli, Antonella Longo
arXiv AI
Jul 28

VecTree-RAG: An Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Combining Vector and Tree Retrieval for Efficiency and Accuracy

arXiv:2607. 23006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific question answering requires a retrieval system to solve two distinct problems: identifying which papers are relevant and locating the supporting evidence within those papers.

By Xinyan Zhong, Yuwei Shi, Yuqi Wei, Chen Shen, Tianhang Zhou, Zhenghao Wu
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Teaching Nemotron Greek: Mining a Corpus, Adapting Retrieval, and Grounding Generation for Modern Greek across Specialist Domains

arXiv:2608. 05138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Greek is absent from NVIDIA's Nemotron retrieval models and from major multilingual retrieval benchmarks, despite being important for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in legal, energy, financial, and medical applications.

By Ayoub Kirouane, Christos Petrocheilos
arXiv AI
Aug 25

LLM-Specific Utility for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."

By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Jiaming Zhang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng