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