通过跨查询一致性提升大模型生成事实性,有效抑制幻觉。
CQC-RAG: Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Cross-Query Consistency

- 将原问题改写为语义相同但句式多样的多个版本,增强输入多样性。
- 在多个查询下保持高且稳定的置信度答案,准确率提升至TriviaQA上+4.76pp,MuSiQue上+9.12pp。
- 无需外部标注或扩大检索范围,可自动评估并过滤幻觉答案,适合高精度问答场景。
检索增强生成(RAG)已成为提升大语言模型事实性的重要方法,但其可靠性仍高度依赖外部证据的检索与使用。语义等价但句式不同的查询可能导致不同检索结果,无关或误导文档会进一步引发幻觉。现有多路径推理方法通过采样多个候选答案并进行投票或置信度筛选来提升鲁棒性,但仍存在两个局限:多样性常由不可控的解码随机性引入,且答案评估通常局限于单一查询引发的证据视角。为此,我们提出跨查询一致性假设:正确答案在语义等价但句式多样的查询下,置信度保持稳定;而噪声诱导的幻觉则表现出不稳定性。基于此,我们提出CQC-RAG框架,协同设计查询级多样性注入与跨查询一致性评估。CQC-RAG将原始问题重写为多种语义不变的查询形式,对共享文档池重新排序以构建查询相关的推理上下文,采用基于证据的协议提取答案-证据对,并根据答案在不同上下文中的置信度稳定性选择最终答案。该设计实现无监督自评估,不依赖扩展检索覆盖。在四个开放域问答基准上的实验表明,CQC-RAG在TriviaQA上超越最强多查询基线4.76个百分点(EM),在MuSiQue上提升9.12个百分点(EM),验证了跨查询一致性在过滤噪声幻觉中的有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a common approach for improving the factuality of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its reliability remains highly sensitive to how external evidence is retrieved and used. Semantically equivalent queries with different syntactic forms may lead to different retrieval results, while irrelevant or misleading documents can further induce hallucinated answers. Existing multi-path reasoning methods improve robustness by sampling multiple candidate answers and applying voting- or confidence-based selection, but they still face two limitations: diversity is often injected through uncontrollable decoding randomness, and answer evaluation is usually confined to a single query-induced evidence view. To address these limitations, we propose a Cross-Query Consistency Hypothesis: correct answers tend to maintain high confidence across semantically equivalent but syntactically diverse queries, whereas noise-induced hallucinations exhibit unstable confidence under such query variations. Based on this hypothesis, we introduce CQC-RAG, a framework that co-designs query-level diversity injection with cross-query consistency evaluation. CQC-RAG rewrites the original question into diverse but meaning-preserving queries, reranks a shared document pool to construct query-conditioned reasoning contexts, applies an evidence-grounded protocol to extract answer-evidence pairs and selects answers according to their confidence stability across these contexts. This design enables self-evaluation without external supervision and does not rely on expanded retrieval coverage. Experiments on four open-domain question answering benchmarks show that CQC-RAG outperforms the strongest previous multi-query baseline by +4.76 pp EM on TriviaQA and +9.12 pp EM on MuSiQue, validating the effectiveness of cross-query consistency for filtering noise-induced hallucinations.
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