REAP: Enhancing RAG with Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning for Multi-Hop Question Answering

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Hauptverfasser: Zhu, Yijie, Zhou, Haojie, Hong, Wanting, Liu, Tailin, Wang, Ning
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhu, Yijie
Zhou, Haojie
Hong, Wanting
Liu, Tailin
Wang, Ning
author_facet Zhu, Yijie
Zhou, Haojie
Hong, Wanting
Liu, Tailin
Wang, Ning
contents Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been extensively employed to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods for multi-hop reasoning tasks often lack global planning, increasing the risk of falling into local reasoning impasses. Insufficient exploitation of retrieved content and the neglect of latent clues fail to ensure the accuracy of reasoning outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning (REAP), whose core idea is to explicitly maintain structured sub-tasks and facts related to the current task through the Sub-task Planner (SP) and Fact Extractor (FE) modules. SP maintains a global perspective, guiding the overall reasoning direction and evaluating the task state based on the outcomes of FE, enabling dynamic optimization of the task-solving trajectory. FE performs fine-grained analysis over retrieved content to extract reliable answers and clues. These two modules incrementally enrich a logically coherent representation of global knowledge, enhancing the reliability and the traceability of the reasoning process. Furthermore, we propose a unified task paradigm design that enables effective multi-task fine-tuning, significantly enhancing SP's performance on complex, data-scarce tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public multi-hop datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, validating its effectiveness in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09966
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle REAP: Enhancing RAG with Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning for Multi-Hop Question Answering
Zhu, Yijie
Zhou, Haojie
Hong, Wanting
Liu, Tailin
Wang, Ning
Computation and Language
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been extensively employed to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods for multi-hop reasoning tasks often lack global planning, increasing the risk of falling into local reasoning impasses. Insufficient exploitation of retrieved content and the neglect of latent clues fail to ensure the accuracy of reasoning outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning (REAP), whose core idea is to explicitly maintain structured sub-tasks and facts related to the current task through the Sub-task Planner (SP) and Fact Extractor (FE) modules. SP maintains a global perspective, guiding the overall reasoning direction and evaluating the task state based on the outcomes of FE, enabling dynamic optimization of the task-solving trajectory. FE performs fine-grained analysis over retrieved content to extract reliable answers and clues. These two modules incrementally enrich a logically coherent representation of global knowledge, enhancing the reliability and the traceability of the reasoning process. Furthermore, we propose a unified task paradigm design that enables effective multi-task fine-tuning, significantly enhancing SP's performance on complex, data-scarce tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public multi-hop datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, validating its effectiveness in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.
title REAP: Enhancing RAG with Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning for Multi-Hop Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09966