A Tree-based RAG Framework for Evidence-Intensive QA via Adaptive Planning and Topology-Aware Evidence Gathering

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04981v1
• Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:34:14 GMT
• Title: A Tree-based RAG Framework for Evidence-Intensive QA via Adaptive Planning and Topology-Aware Evidence Gathering
• Abstract summary: Recent structured RAG methods leverage tree- or graph-based reasoning structures to improve multi-hop QA.<n>We propose APT-RAG, an Adaptive Planning and Topology-aware evidence gathering RAG framework.<n>In experiments on evidence-intensive QA benchmarks, APT-RAG outperforms existing structured RAG methods.
• Score: 5.690105879823579
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent structured RAG methods leverage tree- or graph-based reasoning structures to improve multi-hop QA. However, they face key limitations in evidence-intensive QA, where answering a question requires synthesizing information scattered across dozens or even hundreds of documents: structural rigidity, which limits adaptive reasoning expansion, and topology-ignorant evidence gathering, which prevents effective integration of evidence across different reasoning nodes. To address these issues, we propose APT-RAG, an Adaptive Planning and Topology-aware evidence gathering RAG framework. Adaptive planning dynamically expands the reasoning structure based on question dependencies and evidence requirements, while topology-aware evidence gathering improves evidence coverage through sibling evidence reuse, direct retrieval, and evidence aggregation from child nodes. We further introduce evidence-guided batched answer generation to reduce significant generation overhead in evidence-intensive QA. In the experiments on evidence-intensive QA benchmarks, APT-RAG outperforms existing structured RAG methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyudsl/APT-RAG.

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