InfoGain-RAG: Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Document Information Gain-based Reranking and Filtering

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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Zihan, Liang, Zihan, Shao, Zhou, Ma, Yufei, Dai, Huangyu, Chen, Ben, Mao, Lingtao, Lei, Chenyi, Ding, Yuqing, Li, Han
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wang, Zihan
Liang, Zihan
Shao, Zhou
Ma, Yufei
Dai, Huangyu
Chen, Ben
Mao, Lingtao
Lei, Chenyi
Ding, Yuqing
Li, Han
author_facet Wang, Zihan
Liang, Zihan
Shao, Zhou
Ma, Yufei
Dai, Huangyu
Chen, Ben
Mao, Lingtao
Lei, Chenyi
Ding, Yuqing
Li, Han
contents Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising approach to address key limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as hallucination, outdated knowledge, and lacking reference. However, current RAG frameworks often struggle with identifying whether retrieved documents meaningfully contribute to answer generation. This shortcoming makes it difficult to filter out irrelevant or even misleading content, which notably impacts the final performance. In this paper, we propose Document Information Gain (DIG), a novel metric designed to quantify the contribution of retrieved documents to correct answer generation. DIG measures a document's value by computing the difference of LLM's generation confidence with and without the document augmented. Further, we introduce InfoGain-RAG, a framework that leverages DIG scores to train a specialized reranker, which prioritizes each retrieved document from exact distinguishing and accurate sorting perspectives. This approach can effectively filter out irrelevant documents and select the most valuable ones for better answer generation. Extensive experiments across various models and benchmarks demonstrate that InfoGain-RAG can significantly outperform existing approaches, on both single and multiple retrievers paradigm. Specifically on NaturalQA, it achieves the improvements of 17.9%, 4.5%, 12.5% in exact match accuracy against naive RAG, self-reflective RAG and modern ranking-based RAG respectively, and even an average of 15.3% increment on advanced proprietary model GPT-4o across all datasets. These results demonstrate the feasibility of InfoGain-RAG as it can offer a reliable solution for RAG in multiple applications.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle InfoGain-RAG: Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Document Information Gain-based Reranking and Filtering
Wang, Zihan
Liang, Zihan
Shao, Zhou
Ma, Yufei
Dai, Huangyu
Chen, Ben
Mao, Lingtao
Lei, Chenyi
Ding, Yuqing
Li, Han
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising approach to address key limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as hallucination, outdated knowledge, and lacking reference. However, current RAG frameworks often struggle with identifying whether retrieved documents meaningfully contribute to answer generation. This shortcoming makes it difficult to filter out irrelevant or even misleading content, which notably impacts the final performance. In this paper, we propose Document Information Gain (DIG), a novel metric designed to quantify the contribution of retrieved documents to correct answer generation. DIG measures a document's value by computing the difference of LLM's generation confidence with and without the document augmented. Further, we introduce InfoGain-RAG, a framework that leverages DIG scores to train a specialized reranker, which prioritizes each retrieved document from exact distinguishing and accurate sorting perspectives. This approach can effectively filter out irrelevant documents and select the most valuable ones for better answer generation. Extensive experiments across various models and benchmarks demonstrate that InfoGain-RAG can significantly outperform existing approaches, on both single and multiple retrievers paradigm. Specifically on NaturalQA, it achieves the improvements of 17.9%, 4.5%, 12.5% in exact match accuracy against naive RAG, self-reflective RAG and modern ranking-based RAG respectively, and even an average of 15.3% increment on advanced proprietary model GPT-4o across all datasets. These results demonstrate the feasibility of InfoGain-RAG as it can offer a reliable solution for RAG in multiple applications.
title InfoGain-RAG: Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Document Information Gain-based Reranking and Filtering
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12765