arXiv:2609.13486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that fine-tuning decoder-only large language models (LLMs) for retrieval yields strong first-stage retrievers, with effectivene...
The paper investigates whether retrieval-time signals add value to Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) routing when the query is already known. Experiments across document, audio, and video RAG compare routers that use only the query versus those that also incorporate retrieval signals, keeping all other factors constant. The results show that adding retrieval signals does not reliably improve routing decisions over a query-only baseline, suggesting that any routing benefit must be explicitly demonstrated rather than presumed.
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...
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...
LLM-based query expansion improves retrieval by generating document-like passages. In hybrid retrieval, however, most evaluations fuse fixed top-$L$ dense and sparse rankings. Because the cutoff contr...
The paper introduces DRAG, a query‑adaptive framework that jointly selects retriever and generator configurations for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Two variants are presented: DRAG_QPP, a training‑free routing method using Query Performance Prediction and perplexity signals, and DRAG_SFT, a supervised approach that fine‑tunes an LLM to predict configurations. Experiments on three LLM families and four QA benchmarks show that DRAG_QPP matches strong static baselines while cutting inference latency, and DRAG_SFT consistently outperforms both static and training‑free adaptive baselines, demonstrating a better effectiveness‑efficiency trade‑off.
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.
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:2608. 06196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents backed by large skill libraries must decide which skills to load and in what order.
arXiv:2603. 22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface.
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.
arXiv:2606. 28367v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is routinely extended with methods meant to improve retrieval: query expansion, hierarchical and cross-document summarization, graph-based expansion, per-query routing, rank fusion, and corrective re-retrieval.