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.
arXiv:2608.21252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Question answering (QA) over long, connected documents remains challenging because relevant evidence may span multiple entities and their relationshi...
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:2607. 23006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific question answering requires a retrieval system to solve two distinct problems: identifying which papers are relevant and locating the supporting evidence within those papers.
arXiv:2608. 03860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SciRet, a compute-aware empirical study of retrieval-augmented generation for scientific question answering over CORD-19.
arXiv:2607. 01852v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems use the question-answering capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to access information outside their parameters.
arXiv:2607. 06641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve promising results on medical question answering benchmarks, yet their use in public health is constrained by hallucinations and the rapid evolution of official guidance.
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.
arXiv:2603. 26667v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) turns external documents into evidence for large language models.
arXiv:2608. 20281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often fail to answer questions about a bounded document collection when the source documents are not retrieved at inference time.
arXiv:2501. 06286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-hop question answering requires a system to identify and integrate evidence distributed across documents, yet large language models remain vulnerable to irrelevant context.
Corpus2Skill is a retrieval architecture that transforms an enterprise knowledge base into a hierarchical skill directory, enabling an LLM agent to navigate from high-level summaries to specific documents and backtrack when necessary. On an enterprise customer‑support benchmark, it outperforms single‑shot dense, hybrid, hierarchical‑retrieval, and agentic RAG baselines in answer quality and grounding, with a moderate cost tradeoff. An eleven‑dataset study shows that corpus navigation excels on single‑domain corpora with a recoverable topical taxonomy but is less effective on open‑domain factoid pools or homogeneous‑tabular corpora, providing a design guideline for knowledge‑grounded systems.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems use the question-answering capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to access information outside their parameters. We evaluate if cluster-based semantic chunking improves retrieval and answer quality compared to fixed-size and recursive chunking evaluating on long, structured academic theses using the Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment (RAGAs) framework.