arXiv:2601.08747cs.CLcs.AI2026-01中稿 · EMNLP被引 2

让AI在推理时自主决定何时查资料,提升复杂问答效率

To Retrieve or To Think? Cross-Boundary Context Evolution for Multi-hop Complex Reasoning

  • 根据当前推理状态动态判断是否需要外部检索
  • 在多个基准测试中显著超越现有方法,提升推理准确率
  • 适合需要多跳推理的开放域问答场景

当前的上下文增强方法(如检索增强生成)在多跳推理中起关键作用,但通常采用固定策略,在每一步默认执行外部检索。这种机械式扩展导致计算开销大,且冗余或弱相关证据会降低推理性能。本文提出跨边界上下文演化框架(EvoCtx),将复杂推理建模为有意识的上下文演化过程。EvoCtx通过评估推理状态与已有证据间的语义差距,动态决策下一步是跨边界检索新证据,还是在现有上下文中优化推理路径。该机制避免了不必要的检索,保持上下文紧凑且证据充分。在多个开放域多跳问答基准上的实验表明,EvoCtx显著优于先前方法,为复杂推理任务提供了高效解决方案。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Current context augmentation methods, such as retrieval-augmented generation, play a crucial role in bridging a model's internal knowledge boundary and external evidence for multi-hop reasoning. However, they often follow a rigid policy and treat external retrieval as the default action at each step. Such brute-force context expansion incurs unnecessary computational cost and may degrade reasoning performance by saturating the context with redundant or weakly relevant evidence. In this paper, we propose cross-boundary Context Evolution (EvoCtx), a framework that models complex reasoning as an adaptive process of boundary-aware context evolution. EvoCtx dynamically decides whether the next reasoning transition should cross the current evidence boundary through retrieval or refine the reasoning state within the existing context. It estimates the semantic gap between the reasoning state and the accumulated evidence, and strategically alternates between boundary expansion and intra-boundary trajectory refinement. This eliminates redundant retrieval steps and preserves a compact, evidence-supported reasoning trajectory. Extensive experiments on challenging open-domain and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that EvoCtx significantly outperforms previous methods, offering an effective approach to complex reasoning tasks. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/Anya-RB-Chen/EvoCtx.

多跳推理检索增强自适应推理

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