arXiv AI

Mapping the RAG Landscape: A Four Axis Taxonomy of Efficiency, Defense, Interactivity, and Reasoning

The paper surveys recent advances in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique that integrates external retrieval into language model generation to reduce hallucinations and keep knowledge current. It introduces a four‑axis taxonomy—efficiency, defense, interactivity, and reasoning—to organize contemporary RAG research, covering retrieval methods, fusion strategies, embedding optimizations, and reinforcement learning policies. The survey also reviews evaluation practices, domain‑specific applications, and architectural variants, while highlighting ongoing challenges such as retrieval quality, reliability, domain adaptation, scalability, and explainability.

arXiv AI
Jul 21

A Survey on Knowledge-Oriented Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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 AI
Jun 30

XRAG: eXamining the Core -- Benchmarking Foundational Components in Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2412. 15529v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) synergizes the retrieval of pertinent data with the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring that the generated output is not only contextually relevant but also accurate and current.

By Qili Zhang, Qianren Mao, Yangyifei Luo, Yashuo Luo, Hanwen Hao, Zhilong Cao, Weifeng Jiang, Zhijun Chen, Junnan Liu, Feng Yan, Xiaolong Wang, Jinlong Zhang, Zhenting Huang, Zhixing Tan, Jie Sun, Bo Li, Jianxin Li, Philip S. Yu
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Securing Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Taxonomy of Attacks, Defenses, and Future Directions

arXiv:2604. 08304v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but this access path also introduces security risks that existing work often conflates with inherent LLM flaws.

By Yuming Xu, Mingtao Zhang, Zhuohan Ge, Haoyang Li, Nicole Hu, Yongqi Zhang, Zhiyuan Wen, Jason Chen Zhang, Qing Li, Lei Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 25

LLM-Specific Utility for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."

By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Jiaming Zhang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv AI
Jun 3

UR$^2$: Unify RAG and Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2508. 06165v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities through two complementary paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for knowledge grounding and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for complex reasoning.

By Weitao Li, Boran Xiang, Xiaolong Wang, Zhinan Gou, Weizhi Ma, Yang Liu