Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Zhiyuan, Yu, Haisheng, Guo, Guangchuan, Zhou, Nan, Zhang, Jiajun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16283
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918211624108032
author Li, Zhiyuan
Yu, Haisheng
Guo, Guangchuan
Zhou, Nan
Zhang, Jiajun
author_facet Li, Zhiyuan
Yu, Haisheng
Guo, Guangchuan
Zhou, Nan
Zhang, Jiajun
contents Complex scientific questions often entail multiple intents, such as identifying gene mutations and linking them to related diseases. These tasks require evidence from diverse sources and multi-hop reasoning, while conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are usually single-intent oriented, leading to incomplete evidence coverage. To assess this limitation, we introduce the Multi-Intent Scientific Question Answering (MuISQA) benchmark, which is designed to evaluate RAG systems on heterogeneous evidence coverage across sub-questions. In addition, we propose an intent-aware retrieval framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to hypothesize potential answers, decompose them into intent-specific queries, and retrieve supporting passages for each underlying intent. The retrieved fragments are then aggregated and re-ranked via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to balance coverage across diverse intents while reducing redundancy. Experiments on both MuISQA benchmark and other general RAG datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms conventional approaches, particularly in retrieval accuracy and evidence coverage.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_16283
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MuISQA: Multi-Intent Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Scientific Question Answering
Li, Zhiyuan
Yu, Haisheng
Guo, Guangchuan
Zhou, Nan
Zhang, Jiajun
Artificial Intelligence
Complex scientific questions often entail multiple intents, such as identifying gene mutations and linking them to related diseases. These tasks require evidence from diverse sources and multi-hop reasoning, while conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are usually single-intent oriented, leading to incomplete evidence coverage. To assess this limitation, we introduce the Multi-Intent Scientific Question Answering (MuISQA) benchmark, which is designed to evaluate RAG systems on heterogeneous evidence coverage across sub-questions. In addition, we propose an intent-aware retrieval framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to hypothesize potential answers, decompose them into intent-specific queries, and retrieve supporting passages for each underlying intent. The retrieved fragments are then aggregated and re-ranked via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to balance coverage across diverse intents while reducing redundancy. Experiments on both MuISQA benchmark and other general RAG datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms conventional approaches, particularly in retrieval accuracy and evidence coverage.
title MuISQA: Multi-Intent Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Scientific Question Answering
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16283