arXiv:2602.00083cs.IRcs.AI2026-02被引 1

通过动态协调串行与并行推理,提升多跳问答的准确性和效率。

SPARC-RAG: Adaptive Sequential-Parallel Scaling with Context Management for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

  • 设计多智能体框架,统一管理上下文,实现串行深化与并行扩展的协同。
  • 在多个基准上平均提升6.2的F1值,且推理成本更低。
  • 适合需要高精度长链条推理的应用场景,如复杂问答系统。

检索增强生成(RAG)将大语言模型输出锚定在外部证据上,但在需要长链推理的多跳问题回答上仍面临挑战。现有方法在推理时沿两个互补维度扩展:串行深度用于迭代优化,并行宽度用于覆盖范围扩展。然而,简单扩展会导致上下文污染和扩展效率低下,即使计算量增加,收益也趋于饱和甚至下降。为此,我们提出SPARC-RAG,一种多智能体框架,在统一的上下文管理机制下协调串行与并行的推理扩展。SPARC-RAG采用专用智能体维护共享全局上下文,并对扩展过程进行显式控制。它为每个分支生成有针对性的互补子查询,以实现多样化的并行探索,并基于答案正确性和证据锚定性显式判断退出决策。为进一步优化扩展行为,我们引入一种轻量级微调方法,使用可验证的过程偏好,提升了串行扩展的效率和并行扩展的有效性。在单跳与多跳问答基准测试中,SPARC-RAG持续优于先前的RAG基线,平均提升6.2的F1值,且推理成本更低。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language model outputs in external evidence, but remains challenged on multi-hop question answering that requires long reasoning. Recent works scale RAG at inference time along two complementary dimensions: sequential depth for iterative refinement and parallel width for coverage expansion. However, naive scaling causes context contamination and scaling inefficiency, leading to diminishing or negative returns despite increased computation. To address these limitations, we propose SPARC-RAG, a multi-agent framework that coordinates sequential and parallel inference-time scaling under a unified context management mechanism. SPARC-RAG employs specialized agents that maintain a shared global context and provide explicit control over the scaling process. It generates targeted, complementary sub-queries for each branch to enable diverse parallel exploration, and explicitly regulates exiting decisions based on answer correctness and evidence grounding. To optimize scaling behavior, we further introduce a lightweight fine-tuning method with process-level verifiable preferences, which improves the efficiency of sequential scaling and effectiveness of parallel scaling. Across single- and multi-hop QA benchmarks, SPARC-RAG consistently outperforms previous RAG baselines, yielding an average +6.2 F1 improvement under lower inference cost.

RAG多跳问答推理优化多智能体

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