让大模型自动诊断检索失败原因并选对策,提升复杂问题回答准确率。
Skill-RAG: Failure-State-Aware Retrieval Augmentation via Hidden-State Probing and Skill Routing

- 通过探测隐藏状态识别检索失败,触发故障诊断
- 四种纠错技能可选,针对性修复查询与证据不匹配问题
- 在难例和分布外数据上表现突出,适合复杂推理场景
检索增强生成(RAG)已成为将大语言模型与外部知识结合的基础范式。尽管自适应检索机制提升了效率,现有方法仍将检索后失败视为重试信号,而非诊断根源,未能解决查询与证据空间对齐不足的问题。我们发现,大量持续性失败并非因缺乏相关证据,而是查询与证据空间存在对齐差距。为此提出Skill-RAG,一个故障感知的RAG框架,结合轻量级隐藏状态探测器与基于提示的技能路由机制。探测器在两个流水线阶段控制检索;一旦检测到失败状态,技能路由模块诊断根本原因,并从四种检索技能中选择:查询重写、问题分解、证据聚焦,以及针对真正不可解情况的退出技能,以在下一次生成前纠正错配。在多个开放域问答与复杂推理基准上的实验表明,Skill-RAG显著提升了多轮检索后仍存难题的准确率,尤其在分布外数据集上表现优异。表示空间分析进一步揭示,所提技能位于故障状态空间中结构化且可分离的区域,支持查询-证据错配是类型化而非单一现象的观点。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a foundational paradigm for grounding large language models in external knowledge. While adaptive retrieval mechanisms have improved retrieval efficiency, existing approaches treat post-retrieval failure as a signal to retry rather than to diagnose -- leaving the structural causes of query-evidence misalignment unaddressed. We observe that a significant portion of persistent retrieval failures stem not from the absence of relevant evidence but from an alignment gap between the query and the evidence space. We propose Skill-RAG, a failure-aware RAG framework that couples a lightweight hidden-state prober with a prompt-based skill router. The prober gates retrieval at two pipeline stages; upon detecting a failure state, the skill router diagnoses the underlying cause and selects among four retrieval skills -- query rewriting, question decomposition, evidence focusing, and an exit skill for truly irreducible cases -- to correct misalignment before the next generation attempt. Experiments across multiple open-domain QA and complex reasoning benchmarks show that Skill-RAG substantially improves accuracy on hard cases persisting after multi-turn retrieval, with particularly strong gains on out-of-distribution datasets. Representation-space analyses further reveal that the proposed skills occupy structured, separable regions of the failure state space, supporting the view that query-evidence misalignment is a typed rather than monolithic phenomenon.
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