The paper introduces STAIR, a retrieval system that uses a document’s Table of Contents to guide large language models in accessing global structure, thereby reducing hallucinations in Retrieval Augmented Generation. Experiments with a fine‑tuned Differentiable Search Index show that ToC‑based retrieval yields a low hallucination rate (<0.05%) and improves Recall@1 to 82.6% on the newly released SearchTome benchmark, outperforming baselines like BM25, DPR, and Mistral. The authors also release SearchTome, a diverse dataset of 18 books across six domains, to encourage further research in ToC‑based retrieval.
arXiv:2610.08463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context inference and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) handle evidence selection at vastly different scales, from a single long prompt to an...
arXiv:2606.11350v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) degrades when applied to large, heterogeneous document collections. In RAG systems, dense similarity becomes l...
The paper introduces EAR, an Entity‑Aware Partitioning approach that improves retrieval‑augmented generation for multiple‑choice question answering by extracting normalized surface anchors from questions, answers, and the corpus. EAR retrieves local windows around matching anchors and can attach a larger parent passage via an extractive summary, reducing retrieved words by 37.5‑40.2% compared to fixed‑size chunks. Experiments on a cleaned MMLU‑style subset with Mistral, Gemma, and DeepSeek show modest accuracy changes, none statistically significant, highlighting EAR’s methodological contribution of compact, inspectable retrieval units.
PRIME introduces an index-side optimization framework for structured document retrieval, comprising a Semantic Restructuring track that converts long documents into dense, structured sections and a Metadata Synthesis & Hierarchical Retrieval track that extracts semantic anchors and heading structures for efficient coarse-to-fine retrieval. The approach reduces embedding computation by 45.8× and index vector count by 22.4× while maintaining retrieval quality comparable to structure-aware chunking. In full deployment, Semantic Restructuring improves Answer‑F1 by 13.7%, and the study identifies qualitative regimes that influence when index-side optimization is beneficial or detrimental, noting that strong rerankers neutralize these effects.
arXiv:2610.29722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external knowledge. Modern pipelines combine embedding, chunking, retrieval, rera...
The paper introduces SAFE‑QE, a training‑free, retriever‑agnostic method for query expansion that mitigates hallucinated terms from large language models. It uses a subsequence‑association filter to score candidate terms based on their reproducibility across randomised query contexts, down‑weighting terms that lack corpus support. SAFE‑QE then selects a broad yet consistent set of expansions via constrained coverage maximisation, and defines a new metric, the Hallucinated Expansion Term Rate, to quantify faithfulness. The approach matches state‑of‑the‑art ranking performance while injecting far fewer unsupported terms on TREC and BEIR benchmarks.
Long-context inference and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) handle evidence selection at vastly different scales, from a single long prompt to an entire corpus. We ask whether a single model-inter...
The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.
arXiv:2609.37574v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to enrich user queries in information retrieval (IR) so that a standard retriever such as BM25 can...
arXiv:2610.35868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While language models have become dramatically more capable, retrieval still largely relies on lexical matching or similarity in fixed embedding spaces...
While language models have become dramatically more capable, retrieval still largely relies on lexical matching or similarity in fixed embedding spaces. This creates a capability asymmetry: what the r...
RIT‑RAG is a retrieval‑augmented generation framework that combines content retrieval with structural navigation of documents. It builds a tree for each document from its table of contents or sitemap, then uses retrieved chunk positions to induce manageable sub‑trees that an LLM agent can navigate, read selectively, and reformulate queries. Experiments on financial, scientific, and customer‑support benchmarks show RIT‑RAG outperforms vanilla, graph‑based, and agentic baselines, achieving up to 11.4‑point accuracy gains on the new EntQABench of 2.84 million technical‑documentation webpages.