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: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...
arXiv:2603.16654v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) solely from final answers can obscure failures in intermediate steps, espe...
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: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:2605.28093v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on multi-hop question answering...
The paper introduces BRIDGE, a bilevel optimization framework that jointly trains a large language model (LLM) and a retriever for agentic reinforcement learning (ARL). It demonstrates that adapting the retriever before the policy yields better rewards, and that BRIDGE outperforms existing methods on seven open‑domain QA benchmarks and medical QA tasks, achieving significant gains in accuracy and reasoning quality.
arXiv:2608.22753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at text understanding and generation, yet still struggle to reliably understand and apply externally provided proced...
arXiv:2610.08452v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a widely used approach for grounding large language models (LLMs) in external knowledge. However, configuring...
arXiv:2606. 11209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning.
arXiv:2607. 10795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In open-domain multi-hop question answering (QA), LLM-based search agents offer a promising approach to knowledge-intensive QA by combining retrieval with reasoning.
arXiv:2606. 00593v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as tool-augmented agents to acquire information beyond parametric knowledge.
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.