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
Lit3R is a system developed by tus-nlp for the LitTraceQA shared task, which focuses on evidence-grounded question answering over scientific literature. The system combines off-the-shelf retrieval, reranking, and large language model components without task-specific training, using an iterative retrieval process that merges BM25-based sparse and dense retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, and LLM verification, along with paper-to-paper expansion. In the official test set, Lit3R achieved a 4th place ranking on the leaderboard.
By Akira Ise, Kotaro Kumagai, Yuta Yamaguchi, Hisanori Ozaki, Yukio Uematsu, Ikuya Yamada
arXiv:2606. 28367v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is routinely extended with methods meant to improve retrieval: query expansion, hierarchical and cross-document summarization, graph-based expansion, per-query routing, rank fusion, and corrective re-retrieval.
By Sadanand Singh, Allam Reddy, Manan Chopra
arXiv:2606. 28337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are often evaluated using final answer accuracy, even though their failures can originate from preprocessing, retrieval, context packing, or generation.
By Bharath Simha Reddy Muthyam
arXiv:2604. 02091v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
By Yuhang Wu, Xiangqing Shen, Fanfan Wang, Cangqi Zhou, Zhen Wu, Xinyu Dai, Rui Xia
arXiv:2607. 23006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific question answering requires a retrieval system to solve two distinct problems: identifying which papers are relevant and locating the supporting evidence within those papers.
By Xinyan Zhong, Yuwei Shi, Yuqi Wei, Chen Shen, Tianhang Zhou, Zhenghao Wu