Decide Then Retrieve: A Training-Free Framework with Uncertainty-Guided Triggering and Dual-Path Retrieval

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03908v1
• Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:20:59 GMT
• Title: Decide Then Retrieve: A Training-Free Framework with Uncertainty-Guided Triggering and Dual-Path Retrieval
• Abstract summary: We propose a training-free framework that adaptively determines when retrieval is necessary and how external information should be selected.<n>Experiments across five open-domain QA benchmarks, multiple model scales, and different retrievers demonstrate that Decide Then Retrieve consistently improves EM and F1 over standard RAG.
• Score: 15.463220134915462
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge, but existing approaches indiscriminately trigger retrieval and rely on single-path evidence construction, often introducing noise and limiting performance gains. In this work, we propose Decide Then Retrieve (DTR), a training-free framework that adaptively determines when retrieval is necessary and how external information should be selected. DTR leverages generation uncertainty to guide retrieval triggering and introduces a dual-path retrieval mechanism with adaptive information selection to better handle sparse and ambiguous queries. Extensive experiments across five open-domain QA benchmarks, multiple model scales, and different retrievers demonstrate that DTR consistently improves EM and F1 over standard RAG and strong retrieval-enhanced baselines, while reducing unnecessary retrievals. The code and data used in this paper are available at https://github.com/ChenWangHKU/DTR.

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