RAG improves the factual grounding of LLM by incorporating external knowledge, but deploying RAG on mobile and edge devices remains challenging because retrieved context increases computation and memory. A direct way to reduce this cost is to retain only one retrieved chunk before generation, but the top-ranked retrieved chunk is not always the most evidence-supporting one, since retrieval similarity does not necessarily imply evidential sufficiency. Existing context-reduction methods can improve context quality, but often require additional LLMs or compressors that are costly under a strict mobile budget. In this paper, we study lightweight RAG chunk selection as an evidence-alignment problem. Our selector combines three complementary feature sources: question hidden states that represent LLM-side query intent, MoE routing-derived expert signals that capture the generator's internal routing structure, and retrieved chunk embeddings that preserve candidate-side evidence geometry. A compact multilayer perceptron maps these features to an evidence prototype in the chunk embedding space, and the candidate most aligned with this prototype is selected by cosine similarity. For stricter deployment budgets, we further introduce an optional task-aware feature selection strategy to reduce the selector input dimension. To support supervised evaluation, we construct semantic chunk-correctness labels based on evidence sufficiency rather than answer-string containment. Experiments show that the proposed selector consistently improves rank-1 evidence selection over mobile-applicable baselines by an average of 2.5%. These results suggest that using LLM-side query representations and MoE routing information and aligning them with retrieval-side candidate embedding is an effective and parameter-efficient strategy for mobile-applicable RAG chunk selection.
The demand for powerful instruction following and reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) has promoted rapid development of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The RAG system assists LLM generation by retrieving chunks of query-fit supplementary knowledge from an external database. Conventional RAG systems, however, suffer from information insufficiency due to two factors, which are intent-agnostic retrieval and information fragmentation. Our work proposes a RAG framework, termed InSemRAG, that addresses these challenges via an iterative retrieve-and-check mechanism with two supporting modules, an intention-aware retriever (IAR) and semantics-preserving chunking (SPC). IAR implements a dynamic hybrid retrieval method that adaptively weights the retrieval channels based on the query intent, while SPC performs detection and reparation to the damaged evidence chunks to preserve the semantic integrity. To alleviate the computational latency brought by our iterative mechanism, we leverage small language models (SLMs). Extensive experiments across several benchmark datasets consistently demonstrate the competitiveness of our method against recent state-of-the-art RAG mechanisms. Particularly, our method achieves significant gains on multi-hop and evidence-sensitive tasks, with a 2.65-point improvement in F1 on HotPotQA and a 1.5-point increase in accuracy on FEVER. Our method also achieves competitive performance to Multi-Hop RAG with 4.32× lower latency with the utilization of SLM.
Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari, Chaoning Zhang, Jiaquan Zhang +6
Deploying large language models (LLMs) as personal assistants on mobile devices demands privacy, low latency, and offline availability, yet the computational cost of giant models clashes with strict edge-hardware budgets. We argue that this tension cannot be resolved by model compression alone; it requires decomposing on-device intelligence into complementary functional roles. We present SmartRAG, a fully on-device framework that organizes an intelligent assistant around four coordinated modules -- Perception, Memory, Focus, and Thinking. At the core of SmartRAG is EvoNER, a continually learnable named-entity recognizer that incrementally expands its label inventory through teacher-distilled updates, enabling the system to absorb previously unseen entity types without retraining the backbone LLM. Extracted knowledge is stored in MRGraph, a three-layer provenance-preserving knowledge graph, and retrieved at query time through a hybrid pipeline combining graph traversal, lexical matching, and dense semantic search. The on-device LLM is invoked only for high-value semantic operations -- labeling, planning, and answer synthesis -- keeping inference costs bounded. Experiments on four QA benchmarks (TriviaQA, Natural Questions, HotpotQA, MultiHopQA) show that SmartRAG with a quantized 1.7B-parameter backbone achieves multi-hop reasoning performance competitive with models up to 18× larger, while running entirely on commodity smartphones within practical memory and latency envelopes.
Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) depends critically on the quality and granularity of retrieved evidence. Large retrieval units preserve context but often introduce irrelevant content, which can dilute answer bearing evidence and worsen long context utilization. Fine-grained units are more compact, but they may be difficult to retrieve reliably because short chunks can lack semantic, lexical, or bridging cues needed to match the query. We propose Uncertainty-aware Multi-Granularity RAG (UMG-RAG), a training-free hybrid retrieval framework that treats chunk granularity as query-specific reliability estimation. Instead of training a new retriever or modifying the generator, UMG-RAG uses existing dense and sparse retrievers as complementary experts across multiple chunk granularities. For each query, it converts each expert-granularity score list into an evidence distribution, estimates reliability from distribution entropy, and fuses candidates according to query-specific semantic, lexical, and granularity confidence. We further introduce UMGP-RAG, a parent promotion variant that uses fine-grained hits to locate relevant evidence while returning broader non-redundant parent chunks for local coherence. Experiments on question answering benchmarks show that uncertainty-aware fusion and parent promotion improve generation quality while maintaining a lightweight, plug-and-play retrieval pipeline.