arXiv Machine Learning

Grounded Decoding: Retrieval-Anchored Probability Fusion for Faithful RAG

arXiv:2606. 00432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems scale, it becomes increasingly challenging to ensure faithful grounding in external evidence.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

FCPRAG: Fusion-Controller Parametric Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Stable Multi-Passage LoRA Injection

FCPRAG introduces a fusion-controlled parametric retrieval‑augmented generation framework that uses a lightweight controller to predict per‑passage fusion scores and sample‑level calibration signals, such as a mixing gate and adaptive temperature. This approach mitigates the bottleneck of evidence‑level fusion when multiple passages are retrieved, enabling selective fusion under informative signals and conservative fusion under uncertainty. Experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, PopQA, and ComplexWebQuestions demonstrate consistent F1 improvements over standard RAG and parametric RAG baselines, with gains up to 4.65% on 2WikiMultiHopQA and 7.55% on CWQ, while also reducing tuning cost and enhancing robustness to retrieval perturbations.

By Jinchang Zhu, Jindong Li, Yi Ding, Xiaojian Nie, Rong Fu, Shuangyong Song, Haowei He, Menglin Yang
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
Aug 28

Assessing the Downstream Utility of Evidence-Aware Retrieval in RAG

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.

By Utshab Kumar Ghosh, Debayan Mukhopadhyay, Shubham Chatterjee
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Parameters vs. Context: TRACE Fine-Tuning for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces TRACE, a fine‑tuning framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) that addresses conflicts between retrieved knowledge and a model’s internal knowledge. TRACE uses multi‑agent debate traces to identify correct and incorrect candidates and answer‑shift patterns, providing fine‑grained supervision for reliable knowledge‑source selection. It also incorporates an answer‑completeness regularization mechanism to prevent empty, overly short, or prematurely terminated responses, thereby improving robustness against misleading retrieved content and enhancing answer quality.

By Zhengchen Huang, Yundong Sun, Minrui Song, Shuanglong Yao, Ye Liu, Ji Chen, Xing Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Knowing Before Answering: Decoding Language Models for Reliable RAG

The paper introduces a method for determining whether retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have sufficient, insufficient, or conflicting evidence to answer a question. By training a lightweight linear classifier on hidden activations and attention-derived features from 16 language models, the authors demonstrate that these internal signals reliably predict the adequacy of retrieved documents, outperforming prompting-based baselines and specialized RAG models. Analysis shows that middle-layer hidden states carry the most informative signals for this triage task.

By Syed Mahbubul Huq, Christopher Child, Tillman Weyde, Pranava Madhyastha