arXiv AI By Motaz Saad, Anna Borrelli, Ivan Gentile, Kianna Kazemi, Francesco Piccialli, Antonella Longo

Empirical Evaluation of Open-Source Large Language Models for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in ESG Domain

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper evaluates seven open‑source large language models for retrieval‑augmented generation in the ESG reporting domain, using 498 real‑world ESG reports from EU‑listed companies and 100 synthetic QA pairs. Performance is measured with RAGAS metrics, showing strong retrieval scores but variable generation quality, especially in faithfulness and factual correctness. The results highlight significant differences across model architectures and underscore the need for domain‑specific fine‑tuning to improve factual accuracy.

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.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

EGT-KG: Evidence-Grounded Typed KG Retrieval for Practical Scientific QA with Small Language Models

The paper introduces EGT-KG, an evidence‑grounded typed knowledge graph retrieval framework designed to enhance scientific question answering with small language models (SLMs). It compares three QA settings—standard Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) and two EGT‑KG variants (automatically generated and expert‑defined relation schemas)—using a six‑dimensional evaluation on a biopolymer‑bound soil composite literature benchmark. Results show that both EGT‑KG variants outperform vanilla RAG, with the llama3:8b model achieving a final score of 70.37 (+14.67%) and 68.82 (+12.14%) for the AS and ES variants, respectively.

By Muran Yu, Jiechao Gao, Yuandong Pan, Barney H. Miao, Andrew C. Lesh, Kincho H. Law, Jie Wang, Michael D. Lepech
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
Sep 25

Automated Regulatory Compliance Question Answering in Financial Services with Domain-Adapted Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper presents a retrieval‑augmented generation pipeline for answering regulatory compliance questions in finance. It builds a three‑stage retriever on LegalBERT and a compact 2B–12B generator served with 4‑bit quantization, achieving a Recall@10 of 0.774 on the ObliQA benchmark and improving answer quality via RAFT‑LoRA fine‑tuning. However, the adapted models fail to transfer to Australian case‑law questions, and a closed‑book model performs almost as well while lacking verifiable grounding.

By Tobias Deu{\ss}er, Abhishek Pillai, Aurelio F. Bariviera, Dhananjay Bhardwaj, Lorenz Sparrenberg, David Berghaus, Christian Bauckhage, Rafet Sifa