Beyond Independent Passages: Adaptive Passage Combination Retrieval for Retrieval Augmented Open-Domain Question Answering

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Autori principali: Ko, Ting-Wen, Jiang, Jyun-Yu, Cheng, Pu-Jen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ko, Ting-Wen
Jiang, Jyun-Yu
Cheng, Pu-Jen
author_facet Ko, Ting-Wen
Jiang, Jyun-Yu
Cheng, Pu-Jen
contents Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external documents at inference time, enabling up-to-date knowledge access without costly retraining. However, conventional RAG methods retrieve passages independently, often leading to redundant, noisy, or insufficiently diverse context-particularly problematic - particularly problematic in noisy corpora and for multi-hop questions. To address this, we propose Adaptive Passage Combination Retrieval (AdaPCR), a novel framework for open-domain question answering with black-box LMs. AdaPCR explicitly models dependencies between passages by considering passage combinations as units for retrieval and reranking. It consists of a context-aware query reformulation using concatenated passages, and a reranking step trained with a predictive objective aligned with downstream answer likelihood. Crucially, AdaPCR adaptively selects the number of retrieved passages without additional stopping modules. Experiments across several QA benchmarks show that AdaPCR outperforms baselines, particularly in multi-hop reasoning, demonstrating the effectiveness of modeling inter-passage dependencies for improved retrieval.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Independent Passages: Adaptive Passage Combination Retrieval for Retrieval Augmented Open-Domain Question Answering
Ko, Ting-Wen
Jiang, Jyun-Yu
Cheng, Pu-Jen
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external documents at inference time, enabling up-to-date knowledge access without costly retraining. However, conventional RAG methods retrieve passages independently, often leading to redundant, noisy, or insufficiently diverse context-particularly problematic - particularly problematic in noisy corpora and for multi-hop questions. To address this, we propose Adaptive Passage Combination Retrieval (AdaPCR), a novel framework for open-domain question answering with black-box LMs. AdaPCR explicitly models dependencies between passages by considering passage combinations as units for retrieval and reranking. It consists of a context-aware query reformulation using concatenated passages, and a reranking step trained with a predictive objective aligned with downstream answer likelihood. Crucially, AdaPCR adaptively selects the number of retrieved passages without additional stopping modules. Experiments across several QA benchmarks show that AdaPCR outperforms baselines, particularly in multi-hop reasoning, demonstrating the effectiveness of modeling inter-passage dependencies for improved retrieval.
title Beyond Independent Passages: Adaptive Passage Combination Retrieval for Retrieval Augmented Open-Domain Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04069