The paper investigates whether incorporating an evidence-support signal into retrieval evaluation for retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) improves downstream decision‑making. Across multiple benchmarks and a TREC RAG 2025 setting, the evidence signal alters retriever rankings but its benefits vary: it does not consistently enhance retriever training, its usefulness for system selection depends on generator instructions, and it does not reliably predict answer quality on unseen topics. Human filtering of evidence‑rich passages preserves useful content, yet evaluators disagree on whether this improves final answers, indicating that evidence‑aware evaluation alone does not guarantee better downstream outcomes.
By Utshab Kumar Ghosh, Debayan Mukhopadhyay, Shubham Chatterjee
DynaKRAG is a unified framework that learns a state‑conditioned policy to control evidence acquisition in multi‑hop retrieval‑augmented generation. It uses a deterministic validity layer to build an action set, a learned continuation gate to decide between generating an answer or gathering more evidence, and an advantage scorer to rank evidence operations by predicted gain. Across HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and MuSiQue with various backbone models, DynaKRAG achieves top EM and F1 scores, improves token and retrieval efficiency, and enables terminal evidence compression that reduces context size while boosting answer quality.
By Chenyu Zhou, Yaqi Wu, Xiaolei Guo, Jiaqi Huang, Xianfa Zhang, Junxu Zhang, Zhuo Yu, Zhubo Shi, Jianghao Lin, Dongdong Ge
XHotpotQA is a new benchmark for cross‑lingual knowledge composition in multi‑hop question answering. It presents each instance as an evidence‑dependency graph with explicit language assignments for the question, bridge evidence, answer‑bearing evidence, and distractors, and includes 15,661 training and 7,405 validation examples with sentence‑level support supervision. The dataset reveals significant performance drops when evidence spans language boundaries, providing a diagnostic tool for systems that must integrate evidence across languages.
By Iman Barati, Arash Ghafouri, Behrouz Minaei-Bidgoli
arXiv:2605. 03534v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, yet relevance does not guarantee sufficiency: a topical passage may still fail to justify the answer.
By Jingxi Qiu, Zeyu Han, Cheng Huang
arXiv:2608. 11238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves the factuality of large language models by grounding responses in retrieved evidence, yet existing evaluation frameworks struggle to provide consistent, fine-grained diagnostics across the diverse spectrum of user queries, ranging from close-ended fact-seeking to open-ended explanatory requests.
By Jeonghwan Choi, Taewon Yun, Minjeong Ban, Gyeonghun Sun, Jae-Gil Lee, Hwanjun Song
FCPRAG introduces a fusion-controlled parametric retrieval‑augmented generation framework that uses a lightweight controller to predict per‑passage fusion scores and sample‑level calibration signals, such as a mixing gate and adaptive temperature. This approach mitigates the bottleneck of evidence‑level fusion when multiple passages are retrieved, enabling selective fusion under informative signals and conservative fusion under uncertainty. Experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, PopQA, and ComplexWebQuestions demonstrate consistent F1 improvements over standard RAG and parametric RAG baselines, with gains up to 4.65% on 2WikiMultiHopQA and 7.55% on CWQ, while also reducing tuning cost and enhancing robustness to retrieval perturbations.
By Jinchang Zhu, Jindong Li, Yi Ding, Xiaojian Nie, Rong Fu, Shuangyong Song, Haowei He, Menglin Yang
The paper introduces Evidence Sufficiency Boundary Training, a framework that teaches models to abstain from answering until the supplied evidence is fully sufficient, and to remain stable when additional redundant evidence is added. By constructing ordered evidence chains from datasets such as HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MuSiQue, the method applies level supervision, a boundary flip margin, post‑boundary stability, and answer recall protection. Experiments with Qwen2.5‑3B‑Instruct and LoRA adaptation show improved boundary localization (flip accuracy 0.807 vs 0.781) and a lower unsupported‑answer rate (0.095 vs 0.101) while maintaining competitive raw QA F1.
By Haruto Sato, Yuki Tanaka, Ren Nakamura, Aoi Kobayashi, Mei Ito
arXiv:2608.22856v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: A retrieval-augmented QA system can return different answers after an index expansion even when its requested model identifier, prompt, retrieval pol...
By Jingjie Ning, Xueqi Li
arXiv:2608. 08944v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A failed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) answer can be consistent with several unseen responses to evidence repair.
By Wenzhang Du
arXiv:2606. 28337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are often evaluated using final answer accuracy, even though their failures can originate from preprocessing, retrieval, context packing, or generation.
By Bharath Simha Reddy Muthyam
arXiv:2501. 06286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-hop question answering requires a system to identify and integrate evidence distributed across documents, yet large language models remain vulnerable to irrelevant context.
By Iman Barati, Arash Ghafouri, Behrouz Minaei-Bidgoli
arXiv:2606. 08151v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents often fail not because relevant text is absent, but because decisive evidence is not selected, compressed, or surfaced at action time.
By Xinyu Guan, Qianyang Zhao, Yuming Deng