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arXiv AI By Kevin Mo, Nathan Mo, Richard Zhu

Diagnosing the Fact-Grounding Gap in Multi-Hop Question Answering

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The paper investigates multi‑hop question answering systems and identifies two distinct failure modes: retrieval failures, where the necessary passage is not retrieved, and extraction failures, where the passage is retrieved but the required fact cannot be extracted—a phenomenon termed the fact‑grounding gap. Across three standard benchmarks, extraction failures account for nearly half of all per‑hop deficiencies and are invisible to standard retrieval metrics, remaining unresolved by retrieval‑only interventions. The study shows that these two bottlenecks require different solutions, a distinction currently missing from evaluation practices.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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