arXiv AI

Meet, Compare, or Abstain: LatWeave for Deterministic Multi-Hop Question Answering on Knowledge Lattices

LatWeave is a deterministic multi‑hop question‑answering framework that structures knowledge into a multidimensional lattice and reduces QA to three operators—meet, compare, and abstain—while limiting LLM use to extraction and planning. It achieves near‑lossless performance on complete knowledge benchmarks (e.g., MetaQA) and strong results on templated multi‑hop datasets (e.g., 2WikiMultihopQA), while transparently handling incomplete knowledge through abstention. The approach offers reproducible, auditable answer paths with no performance penalty within its operating envelope.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

DynaKRAG: A Unified Framework for Learnable Evidence Control in Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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 Machine Learning
Jul 28

Does Faithfulness-Guided Alignment Hurt Accuracy? Unlocking Accurate and Faithful Post-Retrieval Reasoning

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.

By Yu Liu, Wenxiao Zhang, Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan, Qiang Sun, Yanbing Liu, Jin B. Hong, Zhiyuan Ma
arXiv AI
3d ago

REALHOP: Rethinking Multi-Hop Reasoning Evaluation via Behavioral Auditing

REALHOP introduces a behavioral auditing framework to assess multi‑hop reasoning by measuring the Behavioral Necessity Rate (BNR), which quantifies how often removing targeted evidence prevents correct answers. Across five benchmarks, the framework reveals a wide gap between annotated reasoning chains and actual evidence dependence, with panel‑mean BNR ranging from 16.6% to 48.9%. By re‑binding entities, factorizing relations, adding competing paths, and placing evidence at traceable locations, REALHOP raises BNR dramatically—from 27.4% to 94.4% on MuSiQue questions—while maintaining high overall accuracy and improving performance on long‑context tasks.

By Jiawen Tao, Xiaokun Yuan, Yaoming Li, Chenxu Liu, Mengzhou Wu, Tong Yang, Maxm Pan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Learning Evidence Sufficiency Boundaries for Selective Answering in Grounded Multi-Hop QA

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 AI
Aug 24

Clarify-Then-Search: A Clarification Benchmark for Deep Search with End-to-End Nugget Restoration

Clarify-Then-Search is a benchmark that tests whether large language models can ask clarification questions to improve the usefulness of deep search results. It uses 518 real-world query pairs from Baidu, where each intent query is paired with an underspecified version. The evaluation involves a clarifier asking up to three questions, a user answerer providing only explicit information, and a rewriter generating a new query that is then searched; performance is measured by a weighted nugget-recall score.

By Deqiang Huang, Jingbo Zhou, Xinjiang Lu, Tong Xu, Hua Wu, Enhong Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Why RAGs Hallucinate: Penalty-Aware Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems with Knowledge-Gap Canaries

The paper introduces a penalty‑aware evaluation framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that uses asymmetric scoring, knowledge‑gap canaries, and a failure‑attribution pipeline. Applying this framework to three commercial RAG products and a baseline on SimpleQA‑Verified, the authors find that while overall accuracy is similar across systems, canary violation rates vary dramatically, showing that systems differ more in when they answer than in what they answer. The study demonstrates that penalty‑aware scoring can reorder system rankings and is robust across different penalty settings.

By Alden Do Rosario, Hussein Younes, Felipe Pires
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 21

LODESTAR: Robust Entropy-Based Answer Selection in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Question Answering -- Directing Frozen-LLM Entropy with a Reinforcement-Learned Prompt Polarizer under Misleading Passages

arXiv:2608. 11922v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy is a strong answer-selection rule in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for question answering: across five QA benchmarks, selecting the answer a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean $F_1$ from 0.

By Hung-Chun Hsu, Po-Jen Ko, Che-Cheng Wu, Li-Yang Chang, Chuan-Ju Wang