arXiv:2605.04495cs.CLcs.AI2026-05

让检索结果更符合生成需求,通过答案稳定性重排提升大模型回答质量。

CAR: Query-Guided Confidence-Aware Reranking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

论文配图:CAR: Query-Guided Confidence-Aware Reranking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于查询生成答案的稳定性变化,评估文档对生成器的实际贡献。
  • 在NQ等数据集上平均提升5.53%的重排效果,且与生成性能高度一致。
  • 无需训练或模型内部信息,适用于任何黑箱大模型,部署简单。

检索增强生成(RAG)依赖于证据排序来决定生成器获取的信息,但现有方法主要衡量查询与文档的相关性。然而相关性不等于生成有用性:相关文档可能引入歧义或干扰,而低排名文档反而能稳定生成结果。本文提出无训练的CAR(置信度感知重排)框架,仅用查询生成答案的稳定性作为控制变量,通过测量每个候选文档对采样答案语义稳定性的影响,评估其边际贡献。该方法不将语义稳定性视为相关性或校准正确性,而是将其转化为粗粒度的优先级约束,并返回与基线排名差异最小的可行排序,仅在生成器证据支持时才调整原有偏好。在NQ、HotpotQA和FEVER上跨稀疏与稠密检索器、七种排序方法和三种生成器家族的实验表明,该方法具有鲁棒性提升。以BM25为中心的主要分析中,平均相对NDCG@5提升5.53%;在固定可答的NQ下游评估中,令牌级F1提升0.43点,且排序与生成增益高度一致(ρ=0.93)。结果表明,CAR是一种部署友好、面向生成器的修正层,补充了相关性并保留了已有信息排序。它无需任务特定训练,也不需访问模型内部如logits或隐藏状态,仅通过生成输出即可应用于任意黑箱大模型。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance. Relevance, however, is not equivalent to generator-side usefulness: a relevant passage may introduce ambiguity or distraction, whereas a lower-ranked passage may stabilize the generator's answer. We present CAR (Confidence-Aware Reranking), a training-free rank-correction framework that uses query-only answer stability as a control and measures each candidate by the change it induces in sampled-answer semantic stability. This controlled contrast estimates a document's marginal contribution to generator behavior without treating semantic stability as relevance or calibrated correctness. CAR converts these confidence changes into coarse precedence constraints and returns the feasible ranking with minimum Kendall distance from the baseline, preserving existing pairwise preferences unless generator-side evidence supports reversing them. Experiments on NQ, HotpotQA and FEVER across sparse and dense retrievers, seven ranking methods and three generator families show robust improvements. In the BM25-centered main analysis, CAR achieves a \textbf{+5.53\% mean relative NDCG@5 gain}; on the fixed NQ-answerable downstream evaluation, it improves token-level F1 by \textbf{+0.43 points}, with ranking and generation gains strongly aligned across rankers ($ρ= 0.93$). These results position CAR as a deployment-friendly, generator-aware correction layer that complements relevance while preserving informative prior rankings. CAR requires neither task-specific training nor access to model internals such as logits or hidden states, making it applicable to black-box LLMs through generated outputs alone.

RAG重排生成优化黑箱适配

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