S2G-RAG: Structured Sufficiency and Gap Judging for Iterative Retrieval-Augmented QA

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Minghan, Zou, Junjie, Lv, Xinxuan, Zhang, Chao, Zhou, Guodong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Li, Minghan
Zou, Junjie
Lv, Xinxuan
Zhang, Chao
Zhou, Guodong
author_facet Li, Minghan
Zou, Junjie
Lv, Xinxuan
Zhang, Chao
Zhou, Guodong
contents Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds language models in external evidence, but multi-hop question answering remains difficult because iterative pipelines must control what to retrieve next and when the available evidence is adequate. In practice, systems may answer from incomplete evidence chains, or they may accumulate redundant or distractor-heavy text that interferes with later retrieval and reasoning. We propose S2G-RAG (Structured Sufficiency and Gap-judging RAG), an iterative framework with an explicit controller, S2G-Judge. At each turn, S2G-Judge predicts whether the current evidence memory supports answering and, if not, outputs structured gap items that describe the missing information. These gap items are then mapped into the next retrieval query, producing stable multi-turn retrieval trajectories. To reduce noise accumulation, S2G-RAG maintains a sentence-level Evidence Context by extracting a compact set of relevant sentences from retrieved documents. Experiments on TriviaQA, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA show that S2G-RAG improves multi-hop QA performance and robustness under multi-turn retrieval. Furthermore, S2G-RAG can be integrated into existing RAG pipelines as a lightweight component, without modifying the search engine or retraining the generator.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_23783
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle S2G-RAG: Structured Sufficiency and Gap Judging for Iterative Retrieval-Augmented QA
Li, Minghan
Zou, Junjie
Lv, Xinxuan
Zhang, Chao
Zhou, Guodong
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds language models in external evidence, but multi-hop question answering remains difficult because iterative pipelines must control what to retrieve next and when the available evidence is adequate. In practice, systems may answer from incomplete evidence chains, or they may accumulate redundant or distractor-heavy text that interferes with later retrieval and reasoning. We propose S2G-RAG (Structured Sufficiency and Gap-judging RAG), an iterative framework with an explicit controller, S2G-Judge. At each turn, S2G-Judge predicts whether the current evidence memory supports answering and, if not, outputs structured gap items that describe the missing information. These gap items are then mapped into the next retrieval query, producing stable multi-turn retrieval trajectories. To reduce noise accumulation, S2G-RAG maintains a sentence-level Evidence Context by extracting a compact set of relevant sentences from retrieved documents. Experiments on TriviaQA, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA show that S2G-RAG improves multi-hop QA performance and robustness under multi-turn retrieval. Furthermore, S2G-RAG can be integrated into existing RAG pipelines as a lightweight component, without modifying the search engine or retraining the generator.
title S2G-RAG: Structured Sufficiency and Gap Judging for Iterative Retrieval-Augmented QA
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23783