arXiv:2606. 11198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inject external knowledge to improve LLM outputs, yet the format of injected content -- distinct from its semantic relevance -- can independently distort the model's attention distribution.
By Yuqi Zhang, Di Zhang
The paper evaluates how robust large language models (LLMs) are when using retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) in practical settings. It investigates whether RAG always outperforms non‑RAG approaches, whether adding more retrieved documents helps, and whether the order of documents matters, using a benchmark of 1,891 samples across five datasets and three task categories. Experiments with 11 LLMs show generally high retrieval robustness, but performance varies by task and prompting strategy, indicating that adopting RAG should be considered on a case‑by‑case basis.
By Shuyang Cao, Karthik Radhakrishnan, David Rosenberg, Steven Lu, Pengxiang Cheng, Lu Wang, Shiyue Zhang
The paper introduces STAIR, a retrieval system that uses a document’s Table of Contents to guide large language models in accessing global structure, thereby reducing hallucinations in Retrieval Augmented Generation. Experiments with a fine‑tuned Differentiable Search Index show that ToC‑based retrieval yields a low hallucination rate (<0.05%) and improves Recall@1 to 82.6% on the newly released SearchTome benchmark, outperforming baselines like BM25, DPR, and Mistral. The authors also release SearchTome, a diverse dataset of 18 books across six domains, to encourage further research in ToC‑based retrieval.
By Vineet Kumar, Meghanadh Pulivarthi, vishwajeet kumar, Jaydeep Sen, Riyaz Ahmad Bhat, Sachindra Joshi
The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.
By Jingyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang
QVAC Genesis III is a 191.43 B‑token synthetic STEM corpus covering 19 domains and multiple difficulty levels, created through a dual generation strategy that uses a weak edge‑scale student model to generate corrective explanations and contrastive reasoning. The authors evaluate the corpus with an LLM‑as‑a‑parser protocol and demonstrate that 1.7 B‑parameter models trained on QVAC Genesis III outperform those trained on Cosmopedia‑v2 and the Cosmo‑1B model on ARC, GPQA Diamond, and MMLU STEM benchmarks, achieving up to +28.57% improvement on ARC‑E and a 99.45% valid answer rate.
By Davide Vitabile, N. Ranjan, Akshay Nambiar, Kamal K. Gupta, Amril Nazir
arXiv:2607. 20433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While language models remain frozen at their training state, the world evolves continuously.
By Jea Kwon, Jiwon Kim, Dong-kyum Kim, Meeyoung Cha