The paper presents a controlled comparison of six retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) strategies for scientific question answering on a large arXiv corpus. All pipelines use the same LLM generator and evaluation protocol, differing only in retrieval design—ranging from classic dense retrieval to late‑interaction methods like ColBERTv2. The authors also release a synthetic question dataset and code to enable reproducible, large‑scale evaluation of RAG trade‑offs.
By Bhagyesh Rathi, Eshan Chawla, William B. Andreopoulos
The paper introduces ORDER, a task‑conditioned retrieval‑augmented generation framework that dynamically adapts both indexing and retrieval strategies to each incoming query. It first clusters questions to learn cluster‑specific chunking, metadata filtering, and reranking settings, then routes queries to the appropriate pre‑built index via nearest‑centroid assignment. Additionally, a supervised query router predicts relevant collections and a Uniform Multi‑source Sampler distributes the retrieval budget evenly across selected sources, yielding superior performance on heterogeneous historical archives compared to existing RAG systems.
By Aur\'elien Pellet (LRE), Julien Perez, Marie Puren
RATIO (Retrieval Across Typed Ideation Operations) is a large-scale benchmark designed to evaluate how well retrieval systems can support scientific inspiration. It defines relevance through three ideation moves—Address, Broaden, and Specify—each targeting different levels of abstraction in literature retrieval. The benchmark is built from millions of full-text CS papers using a novel discourse-marker distant supervision method, and includes extensive LLM and human vetting to ensure quality.
By Maayan Sharon, Tom Hope
arXiv:2606. 20235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Academic paper search is a core step in scientific research, and LLM-based search agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for iterative, intent-driven literature exploration.
By Tingyue Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Daoyu Wang, Yitong Zhou, Jie Ouyang, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen
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.
By Kaysarul Anas Apurba, Md. Hasibul Hasan, Rofiqul Alam Shehab, Asab Azad
arXiv:2609.37911v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Scientific queries are often brief, while relevant papers use specialized vocabulary. Generated query expansion can bridge this mismatch, but earlier...
By Ryan C. Barron, Cade W. Trotter, Maksim E. Eren, Kim {\O}. Rasmussen, Liz D. Miller, Benjamin J. Migliori
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.
By Cenab Batu Bora, Oylum Alatl{\i}, Sebnem Bora, Oguz Dikenelli
Retrieval in the SQL setting has largely been studied as the task of finding, within a large collection of SQL statements, the statement that answers a natural-language question. At scale, however, a more fundamental retrieval problem precedes generation: schema retrieval, identifying the tables and columns a question requires in a database that may contain thousands of them, far more than fit in a model's context.
arXiv:2510. 16152v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scientific literature is increasingly fragmented by disciplinary boundaries, specialized terminology, and potentially sparse keyword systems, making it difficult to capture the evolving structure of modern science.
By Mason Smetana, Lev Khazanovich
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...
By Xuanyu Meng, Jiashuo Sun, Jash Rajesh Parekh, Jiawei Han
arXiv:2503. 10677v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has gained significant attention in recent years for its potential to enhance natural language understanding and generation by combining large-scale retrieval systems with generative models.
By Mingyue Cheng, Yucong Luo, Jie Ouyang, Qi Liu, Huijie Liu, Li Li, Shuo Yu, Bohou Zhang, Jiawei Cao, Jie Ma, Daoyu Wang, Enhong Chen
arXiv:2604. 07590v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to ground large language models in external knowledge sources.
By Valerii Kovalskii, Nikita Belov, Nikita Miteyko, Igor Reshetnikov, Maksim Maksimov