让重排器学会选对证据,提升问答系统在噪声下的鲁棒性。
Rethinking the Reranker: Boundary-Aware Evidence Selection for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- 重排器不再只看相关性,而是选适合生成器的中等难度证据。
- 在噪声检索下平均性能提升10.3%,显著增强系统稳定性。
- 适合需要高鲁棒性的知识问答场景,尤其适用于真实环境部署。
检索增强生成(RAG)系统在存在真实检索噪声时仍表现脆弱,即使所需证据出现在前K个结果中。关键原因在于检索器和重排器仅优化相关性,常选择过于简单或缺乏关键信息的片段,而未考虑其是否适合作为生成器的输入。我们提出BAR-RAG,将重排器重构为边界感知的证据选择器,旨在为生成器找到处于‘恰到好处’区域的证据——既非过于简单也非完全无法回答,而是具有足够挑战性且支持推理的文本,从而提供最强学习信号。BAR-RAG通过生成器反馈进行强化学习训练,并采用两阶段流程,在诱导的证据分布下微调生成器以缓解训练与推理间的分布差异。在多个知识密集型问答基准上实验表明,BAR-RAG在噪声检索条件下持续提升端到端性能,相较强基线平均提升10.3%,显著改善鲁棒性。代码已公开于https://github.com/GasolSun36/BAR-RAG。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems remain brittle under realistic retrieval noise, even when the required evidence appears in the top-K results. A key reason is that retrievers and rerankers optimize solely for relevance, often selecting either trivial, answer-revealing passages or evidence that lacks the critical information required to answer the question, without considering whether the evidence is suitable for the generator. We propose BAR-RAG, which reframes the reranker as a boundary-aware evidence selector that targets the generator's Goldilocks Zone -- evidence that is neither trivially easy nor fundamentally unanswerable for the generator, but is challenging yet sufficient for inference and thus provides the strongest learning signal. BAR-RAG trains the selector with reinforcement learning using generator feedback, and adopts a two-stage pipeline that fine-tunes the generator under the induced evidence distribution to mitigate the distribution mismatch between training and inference. Experiments on knowledge-intensive question answering benchmarks show that BAR-RAG consistently improves end-to-end performance under noisy retrieval, achieving an average gain of 10.3 percent over strong RAG and reranking baselines while substantially improving robustness. Code is publicly avaliable at https://github.com/GasolSun36/BAR-RAG.
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