arXiv:2607.05712cs.IR2026-07

让检索器学会评估一组文档的协同作用,提升多跳问答效果。

Retrieving a Set, Not Independent Passages: Set-Level Compatibility Learning for Efficient Set Exploration

论文配图:Retrieving a Set, Not Independent Passages: Set-Level Compatibility Learning for Efficient Set Exploration
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用整体兼容性评分替代单篇文档独立打分,捕捉多文档协同效应。
  • 在多个多跳问答数据集上,新方法显著提升检索与下游问答准确率。
  • 适合需要跨文档推理的复杂问答任务,尤其对长流程推理有帮助。

多跳问答和检索增强推理需要选择能共同支持答案的证据段落。然而,多数检索器仍对段落独立评分或进行局部监督的序列决策,当证据效用依赖段落间兼容性时容易失效。基于大模型的集合选择虽可建模此类交互,但计算成本过高难以实用。本文将多跳检索建模为查询-集合兼容性评分,提出一种集合级检索框架。训练目标教导检索器将完整且兼容的证据集合排在不完整、含噪的备选方案之前,使集合评分更鲁棒于变长和部分噪声上下文。我们实现两个互补的集合评分器:ParaSet是轻量级后期交互评分器,对预计算的双编码器嵌入应用自注意力以快速探索候选集合;SetCE是基于交叉编码器的重排序器,使用相同集合级目标训练。在多个多跳问答基准测试中,集合级兼容性学习显著提升检索性能与下游问答性能。进一步表明,所提集合级检索器不仅优于文档级检索器,还具有互补的检索特性:融合二者输出表现强于仅从单一文档级检索器获取更多段落。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Multi-hop question answering and retrieval-augmented reasoning require selecting evidence passages that are jointly useful for answering a query. However, most retrievers still score passages independently or make locally supervised sequential decisions, which can fail when evidence usefulness depends on compatibility among passages. LLM-based set selection can model such interactions, but its computational cost limits practical use. We address this gap by formulating multi-hop retrieval as query-set compatibility scoring and propose a set-level retrieval framework. Our training objective teaches retrievers to rank complete and compatible evidence sets above incomplete, noisy alternatives, making set scoring more robust to variable-length and partially noisy contexts. We instantiate the framework with two complementary set scorers: ParaSet, a lightweight late-interaction scorer that applies self-attention over precomputed bi-encoder embeddings for fast candidate-set exploration, and SetCE, a cross-encoder-based reranker trained with the same set-level objective. Experiments on various multi-hop QA benchmarks show that set-level compatibility learning improves retrieval performance and downstream QA task performance. We further show that the proposed set-level retrievers not only outperform document-level retrievers, but also exhibit complementary retrieval characteristics: combining their outputs yields stronger performance than simply retrieving more passages from a single document-level retriever.

多跳问答集合检索兼容性评分大模型推理

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