COFFEQA introduces a counterfactual-guided few‑shot distillation method for open‑book question answering, leveraging minimally modified contexts that prompt the teacher model to produce alternative answers. By pairing factual samples with validated counterfactuals—filtered using a new Context Following Difficulty metric—COFFEQA constrains the student’s decision boundary to better match the teacher’s. Experiments on multiple QA benchmarks show that COFFEQA consistently outperforms factual‑only distillation, achieving significant gains in EM and F1 scores with a limited few‑shot budget.
By Kavinda Kehelella, Sanghamitra Dutta
The paper introduces a joint fact‑verification score that evaluates both answers and the evidence submitted with them. On the FEVEROUS dataset, replacing the DCUF evidence with UnifEE evidence improves the strict score by about 9.6 percentage points, while answer accuracy rises only 1.96 points. The study also shows that increasing context length for large language models yields modest evidence‑gain improvements, and that detailed answer‑evidence analyses uncover patterns missed by aggregate metrics.
By Han Chen, Yingrui Li
The paper introduces ReDiST, a framework that constructs student‑conditioned reasoning traces to enhance learning beyond answer‑only supervision. ReDiST revises student attempts using evidence and a verified answer, then selects the best traces with a frozen reader that evaluates answer recovery and probability. The distilled student is trained offline, and experiments on QA benchmarks show improved performance over baseline trace methods and highlight varying effectiveness across source and transfer settings.
By Shaoang Li, Yanhang Shi, Yufei Li, Mingfu Liang, Frank Shyu, Sandeep Pandey, Luke Simon, Xi Liu, Jian Li
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:2609.37491v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented language models are expected to answer from the retrieved evidence, but in practice they often keep answering when that evidence...
By Zeyan Li, Qirong Guo, SIyuan Qiu, Hu Xu, Chun Li, Jianfeng Xu
Grounded question answering systems should answer only when the supplied evidence supports the answer. In multi-hop QA, this requirement is difficult because partial evidence can make an unsupported a...
The paper introduces RAG‑Stress, a diagnostic protocol that tests how retrieval‑augmented generation models handle misleading evidence. By fixing the question and reference answer, editing a single assertion to support an incorrect answer, and varying source‑priority policies and evidence positions, the study measures misleading rate (MR) and clean accuracy across fifteen systems on multiple QA datasets. Results show that prioritizing documents increases MR by 10.9–13.5 percentage points, with the highest MR when the misleading span appears at the end of the evidence.
By Shunyuan Zhou, Hao Chen, Tianyu Wang, Goose Lin, Zaiyuan Wang, Haiying Zhao
arXiv:2607. 21692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse attention reduces the cost of long contexts by allowing each query to read only selected parts of the input.
By Jim Allchin
arXiv:2609.24799v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) enables efficient deployment of large language models, and PTQ methods are usually optimized and evaluated with generi...
By Yeji Kim, Mi-Young Kim, Randy Goebel
arXiv:2607. 21692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse attention prunes a long context to the blocks a model needs, and the usual selector is distilled from a dense teacher's attention.
By Jim Allchin
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
arXiv:2610.07894v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are expected to answer questions faithfully based on the provided context, abstaining when the context information is in...
By Zizhuo Zhang, Xiong Peng, Jingwei Sun, Rong Yao, Borui Jiang, Bo Han