Doctor-RAG: Failure-Aware Repair for Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jiao, Shuguang, Huang, Chengkai, Qi, Shuhan, Wang, Xuan, Li, Yifan, Yao, Lina
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Jiao, Shuguang
Huang, Chengkai
Qi, Shuhan
Wang, Xuan
Li, Yifan
Yao, Lina
author_facet Jiao, Shuguang
Huang, Chengkai
Qi, Shuhan
Wang, Xuan
Li, Yifan
Yao, Lina
contents Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Agentic RAG) has become a widely adopted paradigm for multi-hop question answering and complex knowledge reasoning, where retrieval and reasoning are interleaved at inference time. As reasoning trajectories grow longer, failures become increasingly common. Existing approaches typically address such failures by either stopping at diagnostic analysis or rerunning the entire retrieval-reasoning pipeline, which leads to substantial computational overhead and redundant reasoning. In this paper, we propose Doctor-RAG (DR-RAG), a unified diagnose-and-repair framework that corrects failures in Agentic RAG through explicit error localization and prefix reuse, enabling minimal-cost intervention. DR-RAG decomposes failure handling into two consecutive stages: (i) trajectory-level failure diagnosis and localization, which attributes errors to a coverage-gated taxonomy and identifies the earliest failure point in the reasoning trajectory; and (ii) tool-conditioned local repair, which intervenes only at the diagnosed failure point while maximally reusing validated reasoning prefixes and retrieved evidence. By explicitly separating error attribution from correction, DR-RAG enables precise error localization, thereby avoiding expensive full-pipeline reruns and enabling targeted, efficient repair. We evaluate DR-RAG across three multi-hop question answering benchmarks, multiple agentic RAG baselines, and different backbone models. Experimental results demonstrate that DR-RAG substantially improves answer accuracy while significantly reducing reasoning token consumption compared to rerun-based repair strategies.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_00865
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Doctor-RAG: Failure-Aware Repair for Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Jiao, Shuguang
Huang, Chengkai
Qi, Shuhan
Wang, Xuan
Li, Yifan
Yao, Lina
Information Retrieval
Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Agentic RAG) has become a widely adopted paradigm for multi-hop question answering and complex knowledge reasoning, where retrieval and reasoning are interleaved at inference time. As reasoning trajectories grow longer, failures become increasingly common. Existing approaches typically address such failures by either stopping at diagnostic analysis or rerunning the entire retrieval-reasoning pipeline, which leads to substantial computational overhead and redundant reasoning. In this paper, we propose Doctor-RAG (DR-RAG), a unified diagnose-and-repair framework that corrects failures in Agentic RAG through explicit error localization and prefix reuse, enabling minimal-cost intervention. DR-RAG decomposes failure handling into two consecutive stages: (i) trajectory-level failure diagnosis and localization, which attributes errors to a coverage-gated taxonomy and identifies the earliest failure point in the reasoning trajectory; and (ii) tool-conditioned local repair, which intervenes only at the diagnosed failure point while maximally reusing validated reasoning prefixes and retrieved evidence. By explicitly separating error attribution from correction, DR-RAG enables precise error localization, thereby avoiding expensive full-pipeline reruns and enabling targeted, efficient repair. We evaluate DR-RAG across three multi-hop question answering benchmarks, multiple agentic RAG baselines, and different backbone models. Experimental results demonstrate that DR-RAG substantially improves answer accuracy while significantly reducing reasoning token consumption compared to rerun-based repair strategies.
title Doctor-RAG: Failure-Aware Repair for Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00865