arXiv Computation and Language

Beyond Relevance-Centric Retrieval: Rubric-Oriented Document Set Selection and Ranking

The paper introduces SetwiseEvalKit, a benchmark with nine dimensions and 28K rubrics for evaluating document sets, highlighting that current rerankers only achieve up to 45% coverage and struggle with cross‑document coordination. It proposes Rubric4Setwise, a training‑free method that transforms rubric criteria into selection signals, outperforming other methods in downstream generation tasks across both short‑form and long‑form scenarios. The study demonstrates the importance of evaluating and optimizing document sets as a whole rather than independently.

arXiv AI
Aug 13

CAR: Query-Guided Confidence-Aware Reranking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2605. 04495v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance.

By Zhipeng Song, Yizhi Zhou, Xiangyu Kong, Jiulong Jiao, Xuezhou Ye, Chunqi Gao, Xueqing Shi, Yu Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Heng Qi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Incremental Pooled LLM Evaluation for Cost-Effective Retrieval Model Selection

The paper proposes an incremental pooled LLM evaluation method for selecting retrieval models in production Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. By having a language model judge the union of documents retrieved by current candidates and expanding the pool only with new documents from added systems, the approach reuses judgments across all systems. Experiments on four benchmarks and a financial news QA deployment show strong correlation with gold-standard rankings, high preservation of pairwise orderings, and significant cost savings—up to 4.9× lower evaluation cost and 65–80% judgment reuse.

By Max Nelson, Hanoz Bhathena, Aviral Joshi, Saket Sharma
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

Q2D-Web: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Retrieval in Agentic RAG Systems

Q2D-Web is a new large‑scale benchmark for agentic Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, featuring a 190 million‑document web corpus and 70 k machine‑reformulated search queries in ten languages. It supplies three sets of relevance judgments—agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set enriched with LLM‑based labels—to evaluate first‑stage retrievers. Experiments on 13 retrievers show consistent ranking across judgment sets but significant variation across domains, languages, and query types, and demonstrate that a carefully sampled sub‑corpus can approximate full‑corpus evaluation with minimal loss in Recall@1000.

arXiv Computation and Language
1d ago

TRIO: Task Refinement with Individual Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces TRIO, a retrieval‑augmented generation framework that uses three agents—query extension, judge, and answer—to iteratively refine queries and improve retrieval and answer quality. It aligns each agent’s objective with rewards derived from answer quality, employs unanimity voting to label expanded queries, and applies dynamic matching‑based rewards with curriculum learning for the answer agent. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show TRIO outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods.

By Yingtao Ren, Xiao Luo, Yiwei Fu, Jinzhao Zhou, Yu-Cheng Chang, Chin-Teng Lin