arXiv:2608.21252v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Question answering (QA) over long, connected documents remains challenging because relevant evidence may span multiple entities and their relationshi...
By Xuanyu Meng, Jiashuo Sun, Jash Rajesh Parekh, Jiawei Han
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
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
The paper introduces EAR, an Entity‑Aware Partitioning approach that improves retrieval‑augmented generation for multiple‑choice question answering by extracting normalized surface anchors from questions, answers, and the corpus. EAR retrieves local windows around matching anchors and can attach a larger parent passage via an extractive summary, reducing retrieved words by 37.5‑40.2% compared to fixed‑size chunks. Experiments on a cleaned MMLU‑style subset with Mistral, Gemma, and DeepSeek show modest accuracy changes, none statistically significant, highlighting EAR’s methodological contribution of compact, inspectable retrieval units.
By Cenab Batu Bora, Oylum Alatl{\i}, Sebnem Bora, Oguz Dikenelli
arXiv:2608. 16185v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents increasingly answer questions over dynamic raw-document collections, where files may change before preprocessing, and relevant evidence (spans, sections, pages, or tables) is query-dependent.
By Xingjun Wang, Gongsheng Li, Qi Fan, Yunlin Mao, Luyan Su, Yingda Chen
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