ArbGraph: Conflict-Aware Evidence Arbitration for Reliable Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Niu, Qingying, Wang, Yuhao, Ren, Ruiyang, Fang, Bohui, Zhao, Wayne Xin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913047956684800
author Niu, Qingying
Wang, Yuhao
Ren, Ruiyang
Fang, Bohui
Zhao, Wayne Xin
author_facet Niu, Qingying
Wang, Yuhao
Ren, Ruiyang
Fang, Bohui
Zhao, Wayne Xin
contents Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remains unreliable in long-form settings, where retrieved evidence is noisy or contradictory, making it difficult for RAG pipelines to maintain factual consistency. Existing approaches focus on retrieval expansion or verification during generation, leaving conflict resolution entangled with generation. To address this limitation, we propose ArbGraph, a framework for pre-generation evidence arbitration in long-form RAG that explicitly resolves factual conflicts. ArbGraph decomposes retrieved documents into atomic claims and organizes them into a conflict-aware evidence graph with explicit support and contradiction relations. On top of this graph, we introduce an intensity-driven iterative arbitration mechanism that propagates credibility signals through evidence interactions, enabling the system to suppress unreliable and inconsistent claims before final generation. In this way, ArbGraph separates evidence validation from text generation and provides a coherent evidence foundation for downstream long-form generation. We evaluate ArbGraph on two widely used long-form RAG benchmarks, LongFact and RAGChecker, using multiple large language model backbones. Experimental results show that ArbGraph consistently improves factual recall and information density while reducing hallucinations and sensitivity to retrieval noise. Additional analyses show that these gains are evident under conflicting or ambiguous evidence, highlighting the effectiveness of evidence-level conflict resolution for improving the reliability of long-form RAG. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/1212Judy/ArbGraph.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18362
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ArbGraph: Conflict-Aware Evidence Arbitration for Reliable Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Niu, Qingying
Wang, Yuhao
Ren, Ruiyang
Fang, Bohui
Zhao, Wayne Xin
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remains unreliable in long-form settings, where retrieved evidence is noisy or contradictory, making it difficult for RAG pipelines to maintain factual consistency. Existing approaches focus on retrieval expansion or verification during generation, leaving conflict resolution entangled with generation. To address this limitation, we propose ArbGraph, a framework for pre-generation evidence arbitration in long-form RAG that explicitly resolves factual conflicts. ArbGraph decomposes retrieved documents into atomic claims and organizes them into a conflict-aware evidence graph with explicit support and contradiction relations. On top of this graph, we introduce an intensity-driven iterative arbitration mechanism that propagates credibility signals through evidence interactions, enabling the system to suppress unreliable and inconsistent claims before final generation. In this way, ArbGraph separates evidence validation from text generation and provides a coherent evidence foundation for downstream long-form generation. We evaluate ArbGraph on two widely used long-form RAG benchmarks, LongFact and RAGChecker, using multiple large language model backbones. Experimental results show that ArbGraph consistently improves factual recall and information density while reducing hallucinations and sensitivity to retrieval noise. Additional analyses show that these gains are evident under conflicting or ambiguous evidence, highlighting the effectiveness of evidence-level conflict resolution for improving the reliability of long-form RAG. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/1212Judy/ArbGraph.
title ArbGraph: Conflict-Aware Evidence Arbitration for Reliable Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18362