FAIR-RAG: Faithful Adaptive Iterative Refinement for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22344v1
• Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2025 15:59:33 GMT
• Title: FAIR-RAG: Faithful Adaptive Iterative Refinement for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Authors: Mohammad Aghajani Asl, Majid Asgari-Bidhendi, Behrooz Minaei-Bidgoli,
• Abstract summary: We introduce FAIR-RAG, a novel agentic framework that transforms the standard RAG pipeline into a dynamic, evidence-driven reasoning process.<n>We conduct experiments on challenging multi-hop QA benchmarks, including HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MusiQue.<n>Our work demonstrates that a structured, evidence-driven refinement process with explicit gap analysis is crucial for unlocking reliable and accurate reasoning in advanced RAG systems.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination and knowledge staleness in Large Language Models (LLMs), existing frameworks often falter on complex, multi-hop queries that require synthesizing information from disparate sources. Current advanced RAG methods, employing iterative or adaptive strategies, lack a robust mechanism to systematically identify and fill evidence gaps, often propagating noise or failing to gather a comprehensive context. We introduce FAIR-RAG, a novel agentic framework that transforms the standard RAG pipeline into a dynamic, evidence-driven reasoning process. At its core is an Iterative Refinement Cycle governed by a module we term Structured Evidence Assessment (SEA). The SEA acts as an analytical gating mechanism: it deconstructs the initial query into a checklist of required findings and audits the aggregated evidence to identify confirmed facts and, critically, explicit informational gaps. These gaps provide a precise signal to an Adaptive Query Refinement agent, which generates new, targeted sub-queries to retrieve missing information. This cycle repeats until the evidence is verified as sufficient, ensuring a comprehensive context for a final, strictly faithful generation. We conducted experiments on challenging multi-hop QA benchmarks, including HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MusiQue. In a unified experimental setup, FAIR-RAG significantly outperforms strong baselines. On HotpotQA, it achieves an F1-score of 0.453 -- an absolute improvement of 8.3 points over the strongest iterative baseline -- establishing a new state-of-the-art for this class of methods on these benchmarks. Our work demonstrates that a structured, evidence-driven refinement process with explicit gap analysis is crucial for unlocking reliable and accurate reasoning in advanced RAG systems for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks.

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