arXiv AI

Reasoning about Intent for Ambiguous Requests

arXiv:2511. 10453v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation, frustrating users and creating safety risks when that interpretation is wrong.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

A Tri-Agent Framework for Evaluating and Aligning Question Clarification Capabilities of Large Language Models

The paper presents a tri‑agent framework for evaluating large language models’ question‑clarification abilities. It involves a Question Clarifying Agent that identifies ambiguities and asks follow‑up questions, a Respondent Agent that simulates human replies, and an Evaluator Agent that judges the dialogue using metrics such as ambiguity handling, question quality, dialogue efficiency, language appropriateness, and intent alignment. The authors illustrate the approach with synthetic supply‑chain data and discuss validating the evaluator against human judgments.

By Yikai Zhao, Saurabh Pandey, Pradeep Kumar Misra
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Retrieval-augmented Decoding for Improving Truthfulness in Open-ended Generation

The paper introduces Retrieval-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a decoding-time method that improves the truthfulness of large language models without retraining. RAD uses a small reference set of up to ten annotated examples to build a grounding space of context embeddings and next-token logits, which it retrieves and aggregates during inference to shape the model’s output. Experiments on four open-ended generation benchmarks and four different LLMs show that RAD consistently outperforms strong baselines and generalizes well across tasks.

By Manh Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Hung Le
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

ConfRAG: Confidence-Guided Retrieval-Augmenting Generation

ConfRAG introduces a confidence-guided approach to reduce hallucinations in large language models and selectively trigger Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) only when the model is uncertain. The ConfQA fine‑tuning strategy trains the model to answer correctly or respond with "I am unsure," achieving a drop in hallucination rates from 20‑40% to below 5% across factuality benchmarks. Building on ConfQA, ConfRAG limits external retrievals by more than 30% while maintaining over 95% accuracy in ideal scenarios.

By Yin Huang, Yifan Ethan Xu, Kai Sun, Vera Yan, Alicia Sun, Haidar Khan, Jimmy Nguyen, Jingxiang Chen, Mohammad Kachuee, Zhaojiang Lin, Yue Liu, Aaron Colak, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Patch the Distribution Mismatch: RL Rewriting Agent for Stable Off-Policy SFT

The paper introduces a reinforcement‑learning based rewriting agent that rewrites training data to reduce the distribution mismatch between supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) and a language model’s generation distribution. By formulating data rewriting as a policy‑learning problem, the authors train a lightweight LoRA rewriting policy that optimizes alignment with question‑answering style, maintains semantic diversity, and enforces task consistency. Experiments on three instruction‑tuned backbones show that models fine‑tuned with the rewritten data achieve downstream performance comparable to standard SFT while mitigating degradation on non‑downstream benchmarks, and preliminary tests suggest the policy can transfer across domains such as logical reasoning and medical question answering.

By Jiacheng Wang, Zhijie Liu, Ping Jian, Zirong Chen, Ke Ren Liao, Zhen Yang, Zhongbin Guo
arXiv AI
Jul 21

From Evidence to Trajectory: Abductive Reasoning Path Synthesis for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agents Development

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.

By Muzhi Li, Jinhu Qi, Yihong Wu, Minghao Zhao, Liheng Ma, Yifan Li, Xinyu Wang, Zhenghan Tai, Zixing Song, Yingxue Zhang, Ho-fung Leung, Irwin King
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