arXiv:2602. 01348v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can achieve strong answer accuracy on multi-hop questions, but outcome-level rewards often leave reasoning traces weakly grounded and difficult to audit.
arXiv:2509. 23071v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agent development is hindered by the lack of executable ground-truth agent-environment interaction trajectories.
The paper introduces CoT-Interpretability Alignment (CIA), a metric that quantifies how well a large language model’s chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations match its internal reasoning processes. Evaluated on two-hop question answering, hint intervention, and integer multiplication across three LLMs, the study finds limited alignment (44.8–75.9%) and demonstrates that post‑training with a reward combining task accuracy and parametric faithfulness can substantially improve CoT faithfulness without sacrificing accuracy. The authors provide a framework for auditing CoT faithfulness and a pathway to making explicit reasoning more trustworthy, with code and data publicly available.
PRO-Step introduces a step‑level process reward optimization framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) that evaluates both logical validity and evidential grounding at each reasoning step. By training a generative Preference‑Based Reward Model (PRM) and using PRM‑guided value tree search to create preference pairs, the method optimizes the policy through step‑level Direct Preference Optimization. Experiments on single and multi‑hop QA benchmarks show that PRO‑STEP achieves the best average EM and F1 scores across five datasets.
arXiv:2609.21492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been shown to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), yet existing optimization methods largely r...
arXiv:2606. 29090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard way to ground large language models in external knowledge, yet most systems retrieve a fixed number of passages for every question regardless of its difficulty.
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.
arXiv:2605. 03862v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful to the model that consumes it.
arXiv:2608.22479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables LLMs to access external knowledge for answering knowledge-intensive questions. For complex multi-hop quest...
ReFIne is a training framework that augments large reasoning models with three trustworthiness properties: interpretability, faithfulness, and reliability. It combines supervised fine‑tuning with GRPO to produce structured, tag‑based reasoning traces, explicitly disclose decisive information, and provide self‑assessments of soundness and confidence. Applied to Qwen3 models, ReFIne improves interpretability by 44.0 %, faithfulness by 18.8 %, and reliability by 42.4 % on mathematical benchmarks.
The paper introduces TRACE, a fine‑tuning framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) that addresses conflicts between retrieved knowledge and a model’s internal knowledge. TRACE uses multi‑agent debate traces to identify correct and incorrect candidates and answer‑shift patterns, providing fine‑grained supervision for reliable knowledge‑source selection. It also incorporates an answer‑completeness regularization mechanism to prevent empty, overly short, or prematurely terminated responses, thereby improving robustness against misleading retrieved content and enhancing answer quality.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard way to ground large language models in external knowledge, yet most systems retrieve a fixed number of passages for every question regardless of its difficulty. This wastes computation on easy questions, starves hard ones, and gives no signal for when a generated answer can be trusted.
arXiv:2607. 10463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends static RAG by allowing language models to iteratively reason, generate search queries, retrieve evidence, and predict answers.