RaCoT: Plug-and-Play Contrastive Example Generation Mechanism for Enhanced LLM Reasoning Reliability
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arXiv
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| Hauptverfasser: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866915579228585984 |
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| author | Cai, Kaitong Zhang, Jusheng Fan, Yijia Yang, Jing Wang, Keze |
| author_facet | Cai, Kaitong Zhang, Jusheng Fan, Yijia Yang, Jing Wang, Keze |
| contents | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) faces a core bottleneck with knowledge-sparse and semantically ambiguous long-tail queries, where retrieval noise distorts reasoning and necessitates costly post-processing. To tackle this, we propose RaCoT (Retrieval-aware Contrastive-of-Thought), a novel framework that shifts contrastive thinking to the pre-retrieval stage. By automatically generating a semantically adjacent yet differently answered contrastive question and extracting a $Δ$-Prompt to capture their key differences, RaCoT guides the model to proactively focus on the ``critical details that determine answer divergence." This approach allows it to suppress semantic interference within a single retrieval pass, overcoming the theoretical bottleneck of single-vector queries that struggle to simultaneously encode signals for what to attend to and what to ignore. On six authoritative benchmarks, including PopQA and TriviaQA-unfiltered, RaCoT outperforms strong baselines like RankRAG and Self-RAG by 0.9-2.4 percentage points. It exhibits superior robustness, with a performance drop of only 8.6\% in adversarial tests, far surpassing the over 15\% degradation in other methods. Furthermore, its low latency (3.12s) and token overhead (11.54) place it on the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, while ablation studies validate the necessity of each component. Ultimately, RaCoT reframes the RAG paradigm from ``post-hoc context cleaning" to ``a priori shaping of discriminative reasoning", offering an efficient and robust path toward reliable AI systems for real-time, resource-constrained deployments. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22710 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | RaCoT: Plug-and-Play Contrastive Example Generation Mechanism for Enhanced LLM Reasoning Reliability Cai, Kaitong Zhang, Jusheng Fan, Yijia Yang, Jing Wang, Keze Artificial Intelligence Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) faces a core bottleneck with knowledge-sparse and semantically ambiguous long-tail queries, where retrieval noise distorts reasoning and necessitates costly post-processing. To tackle this, we propose RaCoT (Retrieval-aware Contrastive-of-Thought), a novel framework that shifts contrastive thinking to the pre-retrieval stage. By automatically generating a semantically adjacent yet differently answered contrastive question and extracting a $Δ$-Prompt to capture their key differences, RaCoT guides the model to proactively focus on the ``critical details that determine answer divergence." This approach allows it to suppress semantic interference within a single retrieval pass, overcoming the theoretical bottleneck of single-vector queries that struggle to simultaneously encode signals for what to attend to and what to ignore. On six authoritative benchmarks, including PopQA and TriviaQA-unfiltered, RaCoT outperforms strong baselines like RankRAG and Self-RAG by 0.9-2.4 percentage points. It exhibits superior robustness, with a performance drop of only 8.6\% in adversarial tests, far surpassing the over 15\% degradation in other methods. Furthermore, its low latency (3.12s) and token overhead (11.54) place it on the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, while ablation studies validate the necessity of each component. Ultimately, RaCoT reframes the RAG paradigm from ``post-hoc context cleaning" to ``a priori shaping of discriminative reasoning", offering an efficient and robust path toward reliable AI systems for real-time, resource-constrained deployments. |
| title | RaCoT: Plug-and-Play Contrastive Example Generation Mechanism for Enhanced LLM Reasoning Reliability |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22710 |