The paper investigates how conversational Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) benchmarks that rely on relevance judgments to determine context sufficiency can be misleading. By re‑running official baselines on the RETECO track and evaluating with both large‑language‑model judges and a blind audit, the authors show that stronger retrievers produce a higher proportion of contexts lacking gold documents yet still containing the answer, leading to a sharp drop in shortcut precision from 0.68 to 0.10. The study demonstrates that many false misses arise from hard negatives, gold content from other turns, or neighboring chunks, and that using retrieval scores alone as a sufficiency detector can underestimate answerability by up to 0.19 in AUROC.
By Ivan Kochergin, Vasily Konovalov
The paper investigates whether the object selected in a grounded language‑model pipeline actually reaches the reader, a failure that can break the handoff between stages. By auditing 600 HybridQA questions across three selector families, the authors find that exact key lookup and title matching recover the selected object in all 1,463 resolvable records, but body‑only BM25 omits it in 26.6% of cases at cutoff five, while hybrid retrieval with reranking omits it only 1.0%. The study also shows that misalignment between selected and retrieved objects can reduce exact match scores by up to 31 points, and introduces the Returned‑Object Profile (ROP) as a tool for reproducible auditing.
By Siddharth Vohra, Runmin Jiang, Xiaomo Li, Min Xu
TRACE is a system designed to bridge the grounding contract gap in LitTraceQA by combining target-aware retrieval, independent typed evidence localization, multimodal table extraction, and schema-driven table construction. It indexes 27,487 papers using multiple representations while preserving question targets, predicts observation units for tables, and assembles rows with evaluator-compatible key normalization. On the official test set, TRACE achieves a 0.760613 overall score, with high paper F1, evidence F1, and multiple-choice accuracy, though table-row and macro cell performance remain lower.
By Sachin Gupta, Divya Godara
AtomCite is an agentic framework that verifies and corrects page‑level citations in multi‑page documents by parsing answers into claims, checking each claim against the cited page image, and applying a deterministic repair policy. The authors introduce DocCite, the first benchmark for this task, built on MP‑DocVQA and DUDE, containing 928 injected instances and 1,909 verified natural errors. Across Gemini, Claude, and GPT models, AtomCite achieves about 93% verification accuracy and improves citation precision from 34% to 87‑90%, while also enhancing hallucination detection in open‑source models.
By Chen Qian, Yimeng Wang, Yu Chen, Lingfei Wu, Andreas Stathopoulos
The paper investigates why large‑language‑model coding agents rarely request a second chunk of tool output, focusing on the precision‑at‑1 rate ($p_1$) of the gold item appearing first in the first chunk. In a benchmark of 500 software‑engineering tasks, the authors compare six value functions and find that increasing $p_1$ does not systematically improve downstream accuracy; the agent can recover the correct answer from any position within the chunk. Adding file‑metadata signals to a keyword scorer actually reduces $p_1$, while a parameter‑free keyword scorer improves $p_1$ but still fails to boost overall accuracy.
By Tatiana Petrova, Andrei Mazniak, Radu State
Re:CAP is a reference‑free audit loop for retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) pipelines that probes for missing documents instead of enumerating all relevant ones. It identifies covered topics, generates probing questions, retrieves candidate documents, and uses an LLM judge to keep only those that add new information. On several benchmarks, Re:CAP recovers a significant portion of gold documents that flat BM25 or hybrid retrieval misses, and human evaluation shows most of these documents add new information.
By Aviral Joshi, Hanoz Bhathena, Max Nelson, Saket Sharma
Optimist Deep Research is an open‑source agent that conducts literature research as an iterative, state‑centric process. It breaks a research question into a tree of subquestions, uses search intents to query multiple scholarly databases, and merges results into a provenance‑preserving document registry. The agent iteratively expands the registry via citation snowballing, evaluates evidence, and refines the research plan through a critic that can add, split, rephrase, deprioritize, or close subquestions, ultimately producing a report with every citation linked to a retrieved document.
By Gihan Panapitiya
CiteVQA is a benchmark that evaluates multimodal large language models on both answering document questions and providing element‑level bounding‑box citations for the evidence used. It contains 1,897 questions across 711 PDFs in seven domains and two languages, with ground‑truth citations generated via an automated pipeline and strict quality control. The evaluation metric, Strict Attributed Accuracy (SAA), rewards a prediction only when both the answer and the cited region are correct, revealing widespread attribution hallucination in current models.
By Dongsheng Ma, Jiayu Li, Zhengren Wang, Yijie Wang, Jiahao Kong, Weijun Zeng, Jutao Xiao, Jie Yang, Bangrui Xu, Yuhan Wang, Bin Wang, Conghui He
arXiv:2607.04576v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: LLM agents now often answer questions from knowledge bases they help maintain. A common intuition says progressive disclosure should make this chea...
By Theodore O. Cochran
arXiv:2606. 05633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented QA pipelines often route retrieved passages through an LLM \emph{rewriter} before a smaller reader, lifting F1 by tens of points on multi-hop benchmarks; this gain is typically credited to improved evidence quality.
By Yuejie Li, Yueying Hua, Ke Yang, Li Zhang, Yueping He, Yueping He, Ruiqi Li, Bolin Chen, Tao Wang, Bowen Li, Chengjun Mao
The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) miss evidence in multi‑hop retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG). It introduces ExecutionRAG, a training‑free register that tracks open sub‑questions and their supporting evidence, allowing the authors to distinguish between true retrieval failures and search drift. Using this method on 1,000 MuSiQue questions, the study shows a significant reduction in missed evidence but also reveals that other error types, such as premature resolutions and abstentions, increase, shifting the bottleneck from search guidance to evidence verification.
By Jiaqi Wei, Wenxuan Huang, Chengdong Xu, Xiang Zhang, Wanli Ouyang
arXiv:2610.26951v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the dominant paradigm for grounding large language models in external corpora, but its similarity-driven, chunk...
By Debopriyo Banerjee, Owais Aijaz, Ahmer Tabassum, Zhuohan Xie, Preslav Nakov, Veselin Stoyanov