DeFT‑RAG is a retrieval‑augmented generation framework that tackles multi‑hop questions by decomposing them into self‑contained sub‑questions, each explicitly naming the entities it queries. The approach removes the need for complex planning or dependency tracking by letting the LLM focus on a single fine‑grained task, while a rule‑based QA table and a lightweight decision model handle bookkeeping outside the LLM. Experiments on MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA and HotpotQA show that DeFT‑RAG outperforms thirteen baselines with both GPT‑4o‑mini and Qwen3.6, reduces input tokens, and achieves a 12.9% reduction in LLM calls through QA caching without sacrificing accuracy.
By Dingyi Kang, Bingzhe Li
LatWeave is a deterministic multi‑hop question‑answering framework that structures knowledge into a multidimensional lattice and reduces QA to three operators—meet, compare, and abstain—while limiting LLM use to extraction and planning. It achieves near‑lossless performance on complete knowledge benchmarks (e.g., MetaQA) and strong results on templated multi‑hop datasets (e.g., 2WikiMultihopQA), while transparently handling incomplete knowledge through abstention. The approach offers reproducible, auditable answer paths with no performance penalty within its operating envelope.
By Yuze Ren, Shaoheng Fan, Tao Wang, Yabo Yan, Han Han
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
Hi-Q is a new framework for multi‑hop question answering that refines queries hierarchically based on evidence retrieved from a corpus. At each node it tests whether the current query unit is supported by evidence; if not, the node is expanded using a dependency‑preserving binary operator and verified for semantic coverage. The resulting query tree grows according to corpus support signals, and Hi‑Q achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on three multi‑hop QA benchmarks, outperforming both iterative retrieval and graph‑based baselines without constructing a corpus‑wide graph.
By Jueun Kim, Sungho Park, Wook-Shin Han
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
TriageRAG is a failure‑aware self‑training method for retrieval‑augmented language models that adapts them to specialized domains using only unlabeled text. It probes each self‑generated question with and without retrieved context, classifies the result into one of four categories (known, solved, context‑failure, retrieval‑failure), and routes each category to a tailored training signal, including a parametric route that teaches the reader to answer when retrieval misses. Experiments on 11 datasets across three domains and on CS‑Bench show that TriageRAG outperforms a budget‑matched SimRAG by 1.2–6.4 points and uniquely recovers closed‑book performance whenever retrieval harms the base model.
By Samarth Varshney, Ritu Yadav