Multi-Hop RAG

RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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26 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Oct 31, 2026

Reading Between the Chapters: A Graph-Free RAG Rebuilt With AI and Human Feedback

Many questions about a book can only be answered by connecting passages chapters apart, such as a cough heard three times across a horse's life. We introduce CrossChapterQA, 1,853 such questions over 14 public-domain books. Each question lists the two to six chapters it needs (spanning half the book at the median) and the relation linking them, cites evidence from each, and has two independent reference answers graded blind. We use it to build LadderRAG, which indexes a book as passages, summaries and book-level cards for about $0.41 and answers a question for under a cent. Its first version failed mostly at retrieval. We redesigned it four times, steered by an LLM judge's verdicts and our analyses of failed answers: a design-level counterpart of RLAIF and RLHF in which feedback changes the architecture, not model weights. We also report the two redesigns that made answers worse. On the 191 questions its first version got wrong, the final version retrieves over twice as many required chapters on held-out books (recall 0.36 to 0.79), and ten annotators rate its answers 6.5/10 on average (764 ratings).

Dipto Sumit, Syeda Fabiayee Jahan, Farig Sadeque

BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Question Answering Document QA Multi-Hop RAG RAG Evaluation

Oct 29, 2026

Retrieving from Your Own Mistakes: On-Policy Training of Embedding Models for Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Complex questions in retrieval-augmented generation require evidence spread over several documents, and an answer is reliable only when the retriever finds all of it. Chain embedding retrievers collect such evidence step by step, re-encoding the question together with the passages retrieved so far, and we find that they are already strong: trained only on gold histories, a small chain embedding retriever that calls no language model outperforms graph-based systems and is competitive with a search agent. This training, however, leaves a gap. At test time the retriever conditions on its own retrievals, which soon contain mistakes: by the third step, about half or more of the states it visits hold a wrong passage, and these passages lower its chance of retrieving a missing gold passage well beyond what the difficulty of the states explains. We propose on-policy state training, which trains the encoder on the states it reaches itself. At every epoch the current encoder retrieves chains for the training questions; each state it visits, including those built on its own mistakes, is labeled with the earliest gold passage still missing while the other missing gold passages are masked, so that no correct continuation is penalized; and the encoder is updated contrastively on these states mixed with teacher-forced ones, so that its training distribution follows it as it learns. The resulting retriever retrieves complete evidence more often than teacher-forced training and the systems we compare, and it transfers without further training to harder long-chain variants of HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA that we construct. On the same states, it recovers from its own mistakes far more often, and controlled comparisons attribute the gain to training on the states the encoder currently reaches.

Chenjie Qiu, Zixuan Zeng, Shaobin Shi +3

Singapore Management University Singapore · Guangdong University of Technology Guangzhou, China

Multi-Hop RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation Iterative RAG Multi-Hop QA RL for IR

Oct 27, 2026

DeFT-RAG: Decomposing Multi-Hop Questions into Self-Contained Sub-Questions with Reusable Answers

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) lets a large language model (LLM) answer questions by retrieving relevant passages from a large corpus. However, RAG struggles with multi-hop questions, which require chaining facts spread across several documents through intermediate entities that the question never mentions. Graph-based RAG methods retrieve once from the entities a question names and so rarely recover the full evidence chain. Iterative RAG methods recover it step by step, but their accuracy is limited by the many tasks they ask the LLM to perform, such as planning the sub-questions, deciding their dependencies, rewriting them as answers arrive, and keeping track of what is known. We propose DeFT-RAG, a RAG framework built on three components. First, DeFT-RAG generates one self-contained sub-question at a time from the original question and the sub-questions answered so far with their answers (QA pairs). Each sub-question names every entity it asks about, which removes the need to plan, track dependencies or rewrite, and lets the LLM focus on a single fine-grained task at a time. Second, DeFT-RAG moves the remaining LLM work outside the LLM: rule-based updates to a QA table that keeps track of what is known, and yes/no decisions made by a fine-tuned lightweight decision model. Third, DeFT-RAG caches the QA pairs and reuses an answer when a later question asks a sub-question with the same meaning. On MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA and HotpotQA, DeFT-RAG achieves the best accuracy among thirteen baselines with both gpt-4o-mini and Qwen3.6 as the backbone, while giving the LLM fewer input tokens than any other iterative method. With a QA cache shared across 1,000 MuSiQue questions, 23.1% of sub-questions are answered from the cache, which reduces LLM calls by 12.9% without lowering accuracy.

Dingyi Kang, Bingzhe Li

University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, Texas, USA

Multi-Hop QA Retrieval-Augmented Generation Multi-Hop RAG Iterative RAG Question Decomposition

Oct 27, 2026

SpectRAG: Weighted Chunk Graphs for Token-Budgeted Context Selection in Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems ground large language models (LLMs) by retrieving external evidence and conditioning generation on the retrieved context. Although dense retrieval is effective for local semantic matching, independently ranked retrieval can return redundant passages, miss cross-chunk dependencies, and provide incomplete evidence for multi-hop reasoning. We propose SpectRAG, a spectral graph-augmented retrieval framework that combines hybrid candidate seeding, weighted chunk graph construction, graph-based expansion, spectral relevance propagation, and token-budgeted context selection. Document chunks are represented by dense semantic embeddings and graph-spectral coordinates derived from a weighted chunk graph whose edges encode semantic similarity, document adjacency, section hierarchy, shared entities, citation links, and similarity between LLM-generated utility questions. At query time, SpectRAG builds a high-recall seed set using exact inner-product search and hybrid relevance signals, expands it over the chunk graph, re-scores candidates using graph proximity and spectral information, and assembles the final context under a fixed token budget. The goal is not merely to retrieve individually similar chunks, but to construct a context that is relevant, diverse, structurally connected, and sufficient for grounded reasoning. Experiments on MultiHopRAG, UltraDomain, and long-document question-answering settings show that SpectRAG improves broad evidence recovery and achieves competitive generation quality against dense, hybrid, HyDE, LightRAG, and NaiveRAG baselines. The results further indicate that graph-spectral structure is particularly useful for inference-oriented and cross-document retrieval, while highlighting trade-offs in early precision, computational cost, and domain-dependent performance.

Zafer Sahinoglu, Abdulazeez Mohammed, Buse Yaren Kazangirler +1

Mitsubishi Electric US Cambridge, 5900-A Katella Avenue California 90630, USA · Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Center (MELIC) Cambridge, MA 02139, USA · Institute of Graduate Programs, Dept. of Computer Engineering, Karabuk University, Karabuk, 78050, Turkey

Multi-Hop RAG Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation Multi-Hop QA RAG Context Compression

Sep 29, 2026

Corpus-Guided Dual-Path Propagation for Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation supports multi-hop retrieval by organizing corpus information into graphs. However, existing relation-free graph retrieval methods rely primarily on query-sentence similarity to search for evidence. This can exclude useful bridging evidence with low query similarity and activate incidental entities unrelated to the reasoning chain. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective approach called NexusRAG, which augments the relation-free Tri-Graph with a corpus-level entity neighborhood structure derived from joint entity co-occurrence and semantic similarity. NexusRAG employs this structure to guide two complementary propagation paths: neighborhood-constrained semantic propagation through sentences identifies the query-relevant entity frontier, while direct structural propagation between neighboring entities expands that frontier to structurally related entities. The propagated entity weights also inform neighborhood-aware passage initialization for Personalized PageRank. Experiments on three multi-hop QA benchmarks and a domain-specific subset of GraphRAG-Bench show that NexusRAG consistently outperforms existing approaches. On the GraphRAG-Bench subset, NexusRAG achieves the highest evidence recall in all question categories, exceeding baselines by 4.2-8.1 points. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/Jacob-biu/NexusRAG.

Baoxian Liu, Tong Wei

College of Software Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration (Southeast University), Ministry of Education, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China

Multi-Hop QA Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation Graph-Based Retrieval Multi-Hop RAG

Sep 28, 2026

STITCH-RAG: Spatio-Temporal Influence Tracing over Topic Hypergraphs for Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multi-hop retrieval-augmented generation requires a retriever to connect evidence distributed across documents while preserving a concise, faithful generation context. Existing indexes leave two complementary gaps: chunk-based RAG can break cross-passage evidence chains, whereas an unlabeled pairwise projection without generating-topic provenance cannot jointly preserve topic-level co-participation and per-occurrence entity descriptions. We propose STITCH-RAG, a hypergraph-based framework with three coupled components. First, a semi-merged topic hypergraph encodes multi-entity co-participation as topic-summary hyperedges while retaining per-chunk entity states linked by canonical-name equivalence. Second, spatio-temporal influence bridging propagation (STIBP) combines topic-space propagation with deterministic chunk-index linkage across name-equivalent states under frequency-adaptive decay. Third, continuous STIBP scores replace binary entity-match seeds in localized Personalized PageRank (PPR). We characterize the condition under which this prior assigns more PPR mass to ground-truth evidence than a binary prior. Under the reported protocol, STITCH-RAG attains the highest reported Contain-Acc and LLM-Acc point estimates among the compared methods on HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA, and higher Recall@8 than the methods included in the standardized retrieval comparison. Results on the mixed-domain benchmark remain auxiliary preference-based evidence because only LLM-judged accuracy is available.

Haodong Yang, Mengzhu Chen, Jia Cai

School of Statistics And Data Science, Guangdong University of Finance & Economics Guangzhou, China

Multi-Hop QA Retrieval-Augmented Generation Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation Graph-Based Retrieval Hypergraph-Based RAG Multi-Hop RAG

Sep 27, 2026

Conformal Factuality Control for Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can ground large language models in external evidence, but retrieved context does not guarantee that generated claims are factually supported. This problem is especially relevant in multi-hop RAG, where retrieval and reasoning proceed through multiple dependent stages. We study whether claim-level conformal factuality control, previously developed for RAG, remains effective in this setting. We apply split-conformal claim filtering to multi-hop RAG and evaluate it on HotpotQA, Natural Questions, and TriviaQA using Llama 3.1 8B and GPT-4o-mini, together with a single-hop reference experiment. Across all six multi-hop model-dataset configurations, increasingly stringent conformal targets consistently increase the fraction of responses whose retained claims are fully supported. At the 95% target, this rate ranges from 95.80% to 97.20%, compared with 55.60%-76.03% without filtering. However, the improvement is strongly selective: only 4.41%-31.09% of generated claims are retained and 9.70%-51.40% of responses remain non-empty at the 95% target. These results show that conformal factuality extends to multi-hop RAG, while demonstrating that nominal reliability must be interpreted jointly with claim retention and abstention.

Muhammad Aimal Rehman, Chi-Kuang Yeh

Department of Mathematics & Statistics Georgia State University Atlanta, GA, USA

Multi-Hop RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation LLM Hallucination Mitigation Conformal Prediction

Sep 9, 2026

LiteRAG: Cost-Efficient Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Graph-based retrieval can improve multi-hop question answering, but existing approaches often incur high query-time costs and produce diffuse, oversized contexts that reduce generation efficiency. We present LiteRAG, a graph-based retrieval method that replaces expensive retrieval-time LLM control with query-conditioned algorithmic exploration and reasoning-chain context construction. On DistComp, a benchmark for multi-hop retrieval over distributed-systems papers, LiteRAG attains the highest overall quality among the evaluated methods (0.798) while reducing per-query latency by over 100

\times

and cost by over 99% relative to GraphRAG Global and DRIFT. On UltraDomain, it matches LinearRAG on overall quality while using about 14

\times

fewer tokens. An ablation study indicates that LiteRAG's query-adaptive thresholding and community-aware hub penalization are the main drivers of its token-efficiency gains.

Daniel Alejandro Coll Tejeda, Pedro García López, Daniel Barcelona-Pons

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Multi-Hop QA Retrieval-Augmented Generation Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation Graph-Based Retrieval Multi-Hop RAG

Sep 4, 2026

CAGE: Coherence-Aware Graph Encoding for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems score each passage independently against the query, assembling context sets that may be individually relevant yet collectively incoherent. We introduce Coherence-Aware Graph Encoding (CAGE), a reranking framework that models "between-chunk coherence" across four dimensions: Intra-Domain Relevance, Noise Resistance, Informational Bonding, and Factual Consistency. Our pipeline transforms retrieved passages into directed heterogeneous entity graphs, amplifies factual anchors via min-out-degree reweighting, encodes structural patterns through a Relational Graph Convolutional Network, and fuses inter-chunk coherence with query relevance for final ranking. Evaluated across four multi-hop benchmarks, CAGE matches or outperforms strong baselines including monoT5 in Recall@5 on bridge-dominated datasets and consistently improves downstream Exact Match, demonstrating that structurally coherent context yields more precise answers even when retrieval recall is comparable or lower.

Tong Qi, Jingyu Wu, Youbing Yin +3

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation Multi-Hop RAG Learning to Rank Multi-Hop QA

Sep 1, 2026

ISO-RAG: Isoperimetric Noise Control for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates large language models (LLMs) hallucinations, yet conventional dense retrieval struggles with the complex reasoning paths of multi-hop question answering (QA). Graph-based RAG captures multi-step relationships but suffers from severe semantic drift and high online latency due to noisy global graph traversals. Thus, we propose ISO-RAG (ISOperimetric Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a geometry-aware RAG framework. By projecting the underlying knowledge graph into a hyperbolic Poincare ball to precompute node-wise isoperimetric profiles, ISO-RAG prunes spurious edges during retrieval, restricting the search space to a strictly localized subgraph. This topological purification regulates Personalized PageRank (PPR) diffusion driving the retrieval process, ensuring exact and low-latency convergence. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that ISO-RAG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by average absolute gains of 10.0% in retrieval recall and 4.3% in downstream exact match, achieving a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off by fundamentally eliminating the latency bottleneck of global traversals. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ZaiizaiZHANG/ISO-RAG.

Siyuan Zhang, Hanchen Wang, Dong Wen +2

University of Technology Sydney · University of New South Wales

Multi-Hop QA Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation Graph-Based Retrieval RAG Robustness Multi-Hop RAG

Aug 31, 2026

PRO-Step: Step-level Process Reward Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation enhances Large Language Models by grounding responses in external knowledge, but multi-hop reasoning remains vulnerable to error propagation, where early retrieval failures confound subsequent steps. Standard outcome-based optimization only rewards the final answer, leaving intermediate retrieval and reasoning errors undetected. While existing process-based methods introduce step-level signals, they still score each step against the final answer, rewarding spurious successes where flawed retrieval coincidentally produces the correct answer. Step-level supervision in RAG requires evaluating both logical validity and evidential grounding at each step. We introduce PRO-STEP: we train a generative PRM that evaluates both dimensions, employ PRM-guided value tree search to construct preference pairs contrasting valid steps against flawed ones, and optimize the policy via step-level Direct Preference Optimization. Experiments on single and multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that PRO-STEP achieves the best average EM and F1 across five benchmarks. Code, models, and training data are publicly available at https://github.com/keemminnke/PRO-Step.

MinKeon Kim, Namjun Lee, Jaekwang Kim

Department of Applied Artificial Intelligence, Convergence Program for Social Innovation, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Multi-Hop RAG RL for RAG Process Supervision Process Reward Models+1

Aug 30, 2026

PAGE-RAG: Provenance-Aware Graph Evidence Promotion for Fixed-Budget Multi-hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multi-hop question answering in retrieval-augmented gener?ation (RAG) often benefits from retrieving beyond the few candidates that will finally be read: narrow retrieval can miss an indispensable hop, while expanded retrieval introduces topical distractors. This challenge is not tied to a particu?lar knowledge-base format. Candidate pools may come from standalone retrievers, standard RAG backends, or graph-based retrieval pipelines. What is needed is a query-aware selection layer that can use relational structure to filter candidates be?fore generation. PAGE-RAG addresses this setting by using a graph as a temporary selection structure, rather than assum?ing a graph-structured knowledge base. It builds a query-local graph over retrieved candidates, records why candidates are connected, and treats each connection as a support hypothe?sis rather than support itself. We identify the resulting failure mode as a connectivity-support gap: connected candidates do not necessarily support the answer. We propose PAGE-RAG, a Provenance-Aware Graph Evidence promotion method that scores candidate paths with relevance, source-tracing meta?data, specificity, hubness, noise, and coherence signals, and applies minimal sufficient selection to promote supporting facts into a compact reader context. PAGE-RAG can serve as a complete retrieval-to-reading pipeline, and the same promo?tion stage can be inserted after existing retrieval or RAG sys?tems without replacing their upstream retrieval logic. Across three multi-hop QA benchmarks under the same final bud?get, PAGE-RAG improves support F1 and answer F1 by 10.4 and 3.3 points on a weighted average over a strong retriever. As a plug-in, PAGE-RAG further improves all reported RAG backends, including reasoning-oriented, compression-based, graph-based, and document/chunk-level systems.

Haokun Deng, Xunkai Li, Hongchao Qin +1

Department of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology

Multi-Hop QA Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evidence Selection Evidence Retrieval Multi-Hop RAG Multi-Hop Retrieval

Aug 30, 2026

AgenticRag-R1: Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Stack Memory for Multi-Step Reasoning, Retrieval and Memorizing

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the factuality of large language models (LLMs), yet existing RAG systems often struggle with complex, multi-step reasoning that requires adaptive retrieval and continuous revision of intermediate contexts. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based agentic RAG methods partially alleviate this issue, but typically rely on coarse-grained action spaces and trajectory-level rewards, resulting in weak reward assignment and a bias toward short-horizon, stereotyped reasoning template. To address, we propose AgenticRag-R1, a RL framework that deeply integrates reasoning, retrieval, and memory via a memory stack and fine-grained action space, supported by hierarchical action-aware rewards and an information-aware trajectory rejection strategy to enable effective long-horizon learning. Experiments across a diverse set of multi-hop, open-domain, and agentic reasoning benchmarks, spanning multiple backbone model sizes, demonstrate that AgenticRag-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines. Moreover, AgenticRag-R1 learns more robust, interpretable, and memory-aware reasoning behaviors, highlighting the effect of fine-grained action modeling and information-aware optimization for long-horizon reasoning. Our code is anonymous available at https://github.com/jiangxinke/Harness-RL/tree/AgenticRAG-R1-Whitebox.

Xinke Jiang, Yue Fang, Zhibang Yang +12

National Engineering Research Center of Software Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China · School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China · Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing, China +3

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agentic RAG Multi-Hop RAG Long-Horizon LLM Agents RL for LLM Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Aug 24, 2026

Better Retrieval, Worse Robustness: How Multi-hop RAG Amplifies Upstream ASR Errors

Speech-based applications pass spoken queries through automatic speech recognition (ASR) before any retrieval module, so ASR errors enter the pipeline as a fixed upstream constraint. We empirically test whether two extensions to standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), entity-graph linking and iterative reformulation, absorb or amplify these errors. Using four English accents synthesized through neural TTS, we evaluate four RAG configurations on three multi-hop QA benchmarks (HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA and MuSiQue) against a clean-text oracle. Although the structurally richer configurations generally retain higher absolute F1 under ASR input, both extensions amplify the error: the F1 gap from clean text to the highest-WER accent is 36-67% larger under their combination than under naive dense retrieval, on all three benchmarks. The dominant failure mode is corruption of one or more query entities, accounting for 87-96% of degradation cases on 2WikiMultiHopQA across all four methods. Two lightweight surface-form mitigations leave most of the gap intact, indicating that downstream retrieval structure amplifies remaining entity errors. We release code and data at https://github.com/Continuum-AI-Corp/spoken-multihop-rag .

Zhenghua Bao

Continuum AI

Multi-Hop RAG RAG Robustness Retrieval-Augmented Generation Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation Multi-Hop QA

Jul 29, 2026

CMT-RAG: Complementary Memory Traces for Multi-turn Multi-hop RAG

Multi-turn information-seeking conversations require both multi-hop reasoning and long-range dependency tracking across turns. However, existing RAG systems typically represent conversational memory as raw dialogue history, rewritten queries, or unstructured summaries, making it difficult to recover the specific prior reasoning steps and evidence required for follow-up queries. Our key insight is to align conversational memory with retrieval by representing dialogue context as sub-question-level reasoning traces. Building on this insight, we introduce MuMu-QA, a benchmark for multi-turn multi-hop RAG with explicit cross-turn sub-question dependency annotations, and CMT-RAG, a complementary memory framework for this setting. At each turn, CMT-RAG employs a state-space trace generator, whose recurrent state serves as runtime memory, to incorporate recent conversational context and decompose the current query into structured trace drafts containing retrieval-oriented sub-questions and dependencies on earlier traces. It then grounds these drafts with retrieved evidence and stores them as persistent memory traces in a session-level DAG, enabling future turns to efficiently recover relevant prior reasoning and evidence. Experiments on MuMu-QA and corpus-level RAG benchmarks show that CMT-RAG consistently outperforms five categories of RAG baselines in answer accuracy.

Lang Zhou, Yingjian Chen, Shuxuan Li +2

Sun Yat-sen University · Shenzhen Loop Area Institude · The University of Hong Kong

Conversational Memory Retrieval-Augmented Generation Multi-Hop RAG Long-Term Conversational Memory

Jul 7, 2026

DynaKRAG: A Unified Framework for Learnable Evidence Control in Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multi-hop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) acquires evidence sequentially, with each new document potentially revealing missing facts, bridge entities, query defects, or sufficient support for answering. Existing methods provide useful operations such as iterative retrieval, query reformulation, evidence critique, and sufficiency judging, but typically organize them within method-specific pipelines or predefined control topologies. This leaves underexplored how to learn a shared state-conditioned policy that chooses among currently valid evidence operations. We introduce DynaKRAG, which formulates multi-hop evidence acquisition as state-conditioned control over atomic evidence operations. At each step, a validity layer constructs the executable action set, and a learned controller selects the next operation. The resulting transition updates the evidence state and may enable new operations at subsequent steps. With Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, DynaKRAG achieves F1 scores of 0.5998 on HotpotQA, 0.5340 on 2Wiki, and 0.3061 on MuSiQue, outperforming the strongest controlled baseline on all three benchmarks. Replacing the learned controller with a uniform-valid policy reduces F1 by 3.96--5.78 points, while removing sufficiency feedback hurts all three datasets. Controlled retrieval-cap experiments further show that additional retrieval is not uniformly beneficial. Together, these results demonstrate the benefit of coordinating retrieval, diagnosis, and gap-directed acquisition under an evolving evidence state.

Yaqi Wu, Xiaolei Guo, Chenyu Zhou +7

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Aircraft Manufacturing Co., Ltd. · Tongji University

Multi-Hop QA Retrieval-Augmented Generation Adaptive Retrieval Agentic RAG Multi-Hop RAG

Jun 21, 2026

Only Ask What You Don't Know: Grounded Delta Planning for Efficient Multi-step RAG

Multi-hop question answering remains challenging for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) because existing approaches either propagate errors across iterative retrieval rounds or over-generate reasoning steps, increasing cost without improving accuracy. We propose Grounded Delta Planning RAG (GDP-RAG), a plan-based framework that targets only the information delta based on three simple design choices: (1) preliminary retrieval to ground planning before execution, (2) a gap-conditioned planning prompt that asks only for missing information, and (3) a skeletal trajectory that pairs each subquery with a Thought capturing evidence from preliminary retrieval and carrying it through to the final answer. GDP-RAG focuses computation on unresolved gaps, yielding concise, reliable reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MuSiQue show that GDP-RAG achieves the highest accuracy (60.63%) among all compared systems while maintaining a cost-of-pass of 0.51, 22% lower than PAR-RAG (0.65) and 68% lower than KnowTrace (1.57), with no method achieving both higher accuracy and lower cost.

Wei-Chieh Chou, Xuanjun Chen, Jian-Ren Lin +3

Dept. of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University · Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University · Department of Economics, National Taiwan University +2

Multi-Hop QA Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agentic RAG Multi-Hop RAG Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

Jun 4, 2026

Self-Augmenting Retrieval for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion language models generate text by iteratively denoising an entire response in parallel, holding a noisy draft of the answer at every step. We show that these intermediate states surface salient entities early in the denoising trajectory, making them a useful lookahead signal for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We further demonstrate that grounding generation in retrieved evidence sharply reduces inter-token dependence, making RAG particularly well suited to parallel decoding. We exploit both through Self-Augmenting Retrieval for Diffusion Language Models (SARDI), a dynamic RAG framework that uses speculative token predictions to guide retrieval during denoising. SARDI is training-free, retriever-agnostic, and applicable to any reasoning-capable discrete diffusion language model. Across five multi-hop QA benchmarks, SARDI outperforms training-free diffusion and autoregressive retrieval baselines at up to 4x higher throughput.

Paul Jünger, Justin Lovelace, Linxi Zhao +2

Department of Computer Science, Cornell University.

Diffusion Language Models Retrieval-Augmented Generation Masked Diffusion Models Adaptive RAG Diffusion Language Model Inference Multi-Hop QA+3

May 27, 2026

A Fixed-Budget, Cluster-Aware Standard for LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation: A Multi-Hop RAG Stress Test

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are often compared by asking a large language model (LLM) judge which answer is better. For multi-hop RAG, this has become a measurement problem as much as a modeling problem: the same score can reflect retrieval quality, answer length, lexical overlap, or a statistical test that ignores clustered data. We ask what happens when these choices are made explicit. We propose a minimum measurement standard for LLM-as-a-judge comparisons in RAG. The standard fixes the top-100 candidate pool, evidence budget, answer cap, generator, and prompt; it also requires pre-registered hypotheses, cluster-aware inference, an exact cluster sign-flip check when feasible, and second-judge replication. Clustered benchmarks can overstate progress; the field should adopt this standard. We stress-test it with Genetic Algorithm Decoder for Multi-hop Evidence Composition (GADMEC), an evolutionary evidence selector, on 400 multi-hop questions in computer science/machine learning (CS/ML) and Materials Science. The protocol changes the empirical story. A binomial test makes all four semantic-baseline comparisons look significant; cluster-aware inference leaves only one Bonferroni-significant result. BM25 beats pure semantic GADMEC under the same budget, while a lexical-semantic hybrid recovers in CS/ML and narrows the Materials Science gap.

Camilo Chacón Sartori, José H. García

Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), CSIC and BIST, Campus UAB, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

Retrieval-Augmented Generation LLM-as-a-Judge Benchmark Validity RAG Evaluation Multi-Hop RAG

May 13, 2026

Retrieval is Cheap, Show Me the Code: Executable Multi-Hop Reasoning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard approach for knowledge-intensive question answering, but existing systems remain brittle on multi-hop questions, where solving the task requires chaining multiple retrieval and reasoning steps. Key challenges are that current methods represent reasoning through free-form natural language, where intermediate states are implicit, retrieval queries can drift from intended entities, and errors are detected by the same model that produces them making self-reflection an unreliable, ungrounded signal. We observe that multi-hop question answering is a typical form of step-by-step computation, and that this structured process aligns closely with how code-specialized language models are trained to operate. Motivated by this, we introduce \pyrag, a framework that reformulates multi-hop RAG as program synthesis and execution. Instead of free-form reasoning trajectories, \pyrag represents the reasoning process as an executable Python program over retrieval and QA tools, exposing intermediate states as variables, producing deterministic feedback through execution, and yielding an inspectable trace of the entire reasoning process. This formulation further enables compiler-grounded self-repair and execution-driven adaptive retrieval without any additional training. Experiments on five QA benchmarks (PopQA, HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, and Bamboogle) show that \pyrag consistently outperforms strong baselines under both training-free and RL-trained settings, with especially large gains on compositional multi-hop datasets. Our code, data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/GasolSun36/PyRAG.

Jiashuo Sun, Jimeng Shi, Yixuan Xie +10

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Texas A&M University +1

Multi-Hop QA Retrieval-Augmented Generation Multi-Hop RAG Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

May 4, 2026

AdaGATE: Adaptive Gap-Aware Token-Efficient Evidence Assembly for Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remains brittle on multi-hop questions in realistic deployment settings, where retrieved evidence may be noisy or redundant and only limited context can be passed to the generator. Existing controllers address parts of this problem, but typically either expand context additively, select from a fixed top-k set, or optimize relevance without explicitly repairing missing bridge facts. We propose AdaGATE, a training-free evidence controller for multi-hop RAG that frames evidence selection as a token-constrained repair problem. AdaGATE combines entity centric gap tracking, targeted micro-query generation, and a utility based selection mechanism that balances gap coverage, corroboration, novelty, redundancy, and direct question relevance. We evaluate AdaGATE on HotpotQA under clean, redundancy, and noise injected retrieval conditions. Across all three settings, AdaGATE achieves the best evidence F1 among the compared controllers, reaching 62.3% on clean data and 71.2% under redundancy injection, while using 2.6x fewer input tokens than Adaptive-k. These results suggest that explicit gap-aware repair, combined with token-efficient evidence selection, improves robustness in multi-hop RAG under imperfect retrieval. Our code and evaluation pipeline are available at https://github.com/eliguo/AdaGATE.

Yilin Guo, Yinshan Wang, Yixuan Wang

Center for Data Science New York University · Tandon School of Engineering New York University

Evidence Selection Retrieval-Augmented Generation Adaptive RAG Multi-Hop QA Retrieval Robustness RAG Robustness+1

Mar 30, 2026

PAR $^2$ -RAG: Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) remain brittle on multi-hop question answering (MHQA), where answering requires combining evidence across documents through retrieval and reasoning. Iterative retrieval systems can fail by locking onto an early low-recall trajectory and amplifying downstream errors, while planning-only approaches may produce static query sets that cannot adapt when intermediate evidence changes. We propose \textbf{Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning RAG (PAR

^2

-RAG)}, a two-stage framework that separates coverage from commitment. PAR

^2

-RAG first performs breadth-first anchoring to build a high-recall evidence frontier, then applies depth-first refinement with evidence sufficiency control in an iterative loop. Across four MHQA benchmarks, PAR

^2

-RAG consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, compared with IRCoT, PAR

^2

-RAG achieves up to 23.5% higher accuracy, with retrieval gains of up to 10.5% in NDCG.

Xingyu Li, Rongguang Wang, Yuying Wang +5

Oracle AI

Multi-Hop RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Multi-Document QA Multi-Hop QA Iterative RAG+2

Mar 17, 2026

IndexRAG: Index-Time Reasoning for Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multi-hop question answering (QA) requires reasoning across multiple documents, yet existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches address this either through graph-based methods requiring additional online processing or iterative multi-step reasoning. We present IndexRAG, a novel approach that shifts cross-document reasoning from online inference to offline indexing. IndexRAG identifies bridge entities shared across documents and generates bridging facts as independently retrievable units, requiring no additional training or fine-tuning. Experiments on three widely-used multi-hop QA benchmarks (HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, MuSiQue) show that IndexRAG improves F1 over Naive RAG by 4.6 points on average, while requiring only single-pass retrieval and a single LLM call at inference time. When combined with IRCoT, IndexRAG achieves the best average performance among all evaluated methods, including graph-based baselines such as HippoRAG2 and FastGraphRAG, while relying on a flat vector index. Our code is available at https://github.com/Continuum-AI-Corp/IndexRAG .

Zhenghua Bao, Yi Shi

Continuum AI Shanghai, China · Continuum AI San Francisco, CA, USA

Multi-Hop QA Retrieval-Augmented Generation Multi-Hop RAG Multi-Document QA

Mar 6, 2026

StratRAG: A Multi-Hop Retrieval Evaluation Dataset for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

We introduce StratRAG, an open-source retrieval evaluation dataset for benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems on multi-hop reasoning tasks under realistic, noisy document-pool conditions. Derived from HotpotQA (distractor setting), StratRAG comprises 2,200 examples across three question types -- bridge, comparison, and yes-no -- each paired with a pool of 15 candidate documents containing exactly 2 gold documents and 13 topically related distractors. We benchmark three retrieval strategies -- BM25, dense retrieval (all-MiniLM-L6-v2), and hybrid fusion -- reporting Recall@k, MRR, and NDCG@5 on the validation set. Hybrid retrieval achieves the best overall performance (Recall@2 = 0.70, MRR = 0.93), yet bridge questions remain substantially harder (Recall@2 = 0.67), motivating future work on reinforcement-learning-based retrieval policies. StratRAG is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Aryanp088/StratRAG.

Aryan Patodiya

Department of Computer Science, California State University, Fresno, Fresno, CA, USA

Multi-Hop Retrieval RAG Evaluation Multi-Hop RAG Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Information Retrieval Multi-Hop QA+1

Feb 4, 2026

AutoPrunedRetriever: Persistent Reasoning Graphs for Efficient and Extensible Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a standard approach for knowledge-intensive LLM tasks. Complex reasoning remains challenging because queries often require composing dispersed evidence through multiple dependent reasoning steps. Yet existing RAG systems process queries independently, repeatedly retrieving overlapping evidence and reconstructing established reasoning. Preserving such reasoning makes previously retrieved evidence and intermediate results reusable for subsequent queries. However, inference-time reuse becomes increasingly costly as the history grows, motivating a compact representation that preserves useful information without substantial loss in quality. To address these challenges, we present AutoPrunedRetriever (APR), a graph-based RAG system that encodes corpus facts and query-derived reasoning in a shared symbolic codebook. The codebook serves both as the retrieval index and as persistent memory, representing facts, questions, and answers as compact edge sequences, so that the previously established structure can be directly retrieved and reused. At inference time, APR retrieves query-specific reasoning paths and constructs compact prompts, while incremental consolidation keeps the growing memory compact. For deployments where the retriever cannot be replaced, we introduce AutoPruned Layer (APL), which leaves host retrieval unchanged but replaces the retrieved context with the corresponding entries in the shared symbolic codebook, writing each question and answer back as a compact structure. Across five complex-reasoning benchmarks, APR improves accuracy over the strongest baseline by 1.8-10.8 points while using up to 96% fewer input tokens. APL reduces generator input by 60-96% across host systems and preserves answer quality on document-style contexts.

Ning Wang, Kuanyan Zhu, Daniel Yuehwoon Yee +4

Cornell University · University of Cambridge · The University of Hong Kong +2

RAG Context Compression Retrieval-Augmented Generation Structured RAG Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Multi-Hop RAG

Oct 17, 2025

Think Parallax: Solving Multi-Hop Problems via Multi-View Knowledge-Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) still struggle with multi-hop reasoning over knowledge-graphs (KGs), and we identify a previously overlooked structural reason for this difficulty: Transformer attention heads naturally specialize in distinct semantic relations across reasoning stages, forming a hop-aligned relay pattern. This key finding suggests that multi-hop reasoning is inherently multi-view, yet existing KG-based retrieval-augmented generation (KG-RAG) systems collapse all reasoning hops into a single representation, flat embedding space, suppressing this implicit structure and causing noisy or drifted path exploration. We introduce ParallaxRAG, a symmetric multi-view framework that decouples queries and KGs into aligned, head-specific semantic spaces. By enforcing relational diversity across multiple heads while constraining weakly related paths, ParallaxRAG constructs more accurate, cleaner subgraphs and guides LLMs through grounded, hop-wise reasoning. On WebQSP and CWQ, it achieves state-of-the-art retrieval and QA performance, substantially reduces hallucination, and generalizes strongly to the biomedical BioASQ benchmark.

Jinliang Liu, Jiale Bai, Shaoning Zeng

Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Huzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Huzhou, Zhejiang, China · School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Multi-Hop RAG Multi-Hop QA Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation Knowledge Graph Question Answering Hallucination in RAG