FCPRAG: Fusion-Controller Parametric Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Stable Multi-Passage LoRA Injection
Organizations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · University of Macau · Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom
Abstract
Parametric retrieval-augmented generation (PRAG) injects retrieved evidence into a large language model (LLM) through passage-specific LoRA adapters, reducing reliance on long in-context prompts. When multiple passages are retrieved for the same query, however, evidence-level fusion becomes a bottleneck: equal-weight merging can amplify weak or conflicting evidence, and translating retrieval signals into fusion weights often requires fragile global tuning. We propose FCPRAG, a fusion-controlled parametric RAG framework that adds a lightweight controller for retrieval-conditioned, sample-level adapter fusion. The controller predicts per-passage fusion scores together with sample-level calibration signals, including a mixing gate and an adaptive temperature, enabling fusion that stays selective under informative retrieval signals and conservative under uncertainty. FCPRAG is trained with merge-aware supervision derived from each adapter's marginal contribution within a multi-adapter merge, using training data only. We further show that a single dataset-level temperature is suboptimal under heteroscedastic retrieval uncertainty, motivating sample-level adaptation. Experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, PopQA, and ComplexWebQuestions (CWQ) across three LLM backbones show that FCPRAG consistently improves F1 over standard RAG and parametric RAG baselines, with gains of up to 4.65% on 2WikiMultiHopQA and 7.55% on CWQ, while also reducing tuning cost and improving robustness under retrieval perturbations.
Figures & tables
| Method | Parametric evidence injection | Fusion in parameter space | Sample-level calibrated fusion | Uniform-prior fallback |
| RAG Lewis et al. 2020 | × | × | × | × |
| PRAG Su et al. 2025a | ✓ | ✓ | × | × |
| DyPRAG Tan et al. 2025 | ✓ | ✓ | × | × |
| Poly-PRAG Su et al. 2025b | ✓ | ✓ | × | × |
| FCPRAG (Ours) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Base LLM | Method | 2WikiMultiHopQA | HotpotQA | PopQA | CWQ | Avg. Rank | |||||
| Compare | Bridge | Inference | Compose | Avg. | Bridge | Compare | |||||
| Llama-3.2-1B | Vanilla | 36.48 | 34.23 | 13.80 | 5.60 | 22.53 | 9.85 | 37.84 | 14.56 | 28.52 | 8.00 |
| Standard RAG | 41.22 | 39.31 | 15.57 | 7.22 | 25.83 | 11.42 | 39.39 | 17.15 | 31.78 | 6.38 | |
| PRAG | 46.83 | 44.32 | 17.16 | 8.55 | 29.22 | 12.99 | 41.84 | 19.16 | 32.09 | 3.62 | |
| PRAG-Combine | 41.03 | 41.26 | 19.37 | 8.21 | 27.47 | 21.35 | 42.73 | 32.94 | 31.82 | 4.31 | |
| DyPRAG | 41.53 | 37.98 | 18.67 | 8.21 | 26.60 | 10.84 | 42.91 | 18.69 | 31.92 | 5.31 | |
| Base LLM | Method | Cmp. | Br. | Inf. | Compst. | Avg. |
| Qwen2.5-1.5B | PRAG | 43.85 | 35.41 | 20.17 | 12.77 | 28.05 |
| PRAG-Combine | 40.62 | 37.95 | 18.03 | 7.58 | 26.04 | |
| Random Ctrl. | 44.39 | 36.05 | 16.10 | 7.95 | 26.12 | |
| Random Ctrl.-Combine | 38.98 | 41.87 | 18.32 | 7.32 | 26.62 | |
| FCPRAG (Ours) | 45.59 | 42.89 | 17.81 | 13.18 | 29.87 | |
| FCPRAG -Combine | 38.97 | 43.73 | 19.04 | 7.78 | 27.38 |
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Retrieval-augmented generation connects language models to external knowledge so answers can use current, domain-specific evidence.
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