analiza aiqbench
This study investigates whether performance boosts in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines are causally driven by the gold answer appearing in rewritten contexts rather than improved evidence curation, ultimately finding that removing the answer string significantly degrades reader F1 scores. However, the authors have withdrawn the manuscript after identifying critical errors in their experimental analysis regarding these relationships and failing to validate findings across alternative sentinel probes. Consequently, no definitive conclusions on RAG rewriter efficacy can be drawn from this specific work at present.
Answer Presence Drives RAG Rewriting Gains
arXiv:2606.05633v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented QA pipelines often route retrieved passages through an LLM \emph{rewriter} before a smaller reader, lifting F1 by tens of points on multi-hop benchmarks; this gain is typically credited to improved evidence quality. We ask whether that lift is causally driven by the gold answer string appearing in the rewritten context rather than by curation per se, using a controlled intervention audit. For each rewritten context we re-run the reader after one of four controlled edits to the compile output: removing the gold answer span, replacing a length-matched random non-answer span (placebo), or injecting the gold into rewrites where it was absent (at the prefix or at a midpoint sentence boundary). Across twelve completed (cell, baseline) intervention runs spanning three reader families (Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen3.5-35B, GLM-4.7), two datasets (HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA), and three compiler arrangements (MA-only, MB-only, MA$+$verify), removing the gold answer drops reader F1 by $28$ to $64$ points beyond the length-matched placebo on paired \texttt{answer-in-compile} strata, and prepending the gold into rewrites that lacked it raises F1 by $+0.7$ to $+9.7$ points in $10$ of $12$ (cell, baseline) combinations. A companion five-sentinel audit shows the conventional single-\texttt{[MASK]} probe is itself sentinel-fragile: on 2Wiki it reports a $+4.12$~F1 ``non-leakage residual'' that flips to $-3.33$ to $-7.81$~F1 under four alternative sentinels and fails an equivalence test for three of those four ($1/4$~pass). We do not propose a new rewriter or mitigation; we release the intervention runner and the sentinel panel so that other rewriter-gain claims can be tested against the same standard.
Abstract:Retrieval-augmented QA pipelines often route retrieved passages through an LLM \emph{rewriter} before a smaller reader, lifting F1 by tens of points on multi-hop benchmarks; this gain is typically credited to improved evidence quality. We ask whether that lift is causally driven by the gold answer string appearing in the rewritten context rather than by curation per se, using a controlled intervention audit. For each rewritten context we re-run the reader after one of four controlled edits to the compile output: removing the gold answer span, replacing a length-matched random non-answer span (placebo), or injecting the gold into rewrites where it was absent (at the prefix or at a midpoint sentence boundary). Across twelve completed (cell, baseline) intervention runs spanning three reader families (Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen3.5-35B, GLM-4.7), two datasets (HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA), and three compiler arrangements (MA-only, MB-only, MA$+$verify), removing the gold answer drops reader F1 by $28$ to $64$ points beyond the length-matched placebo on paired \texttt{answer-in-compile} strata, and prepending the gold into rewrites that lacked it raises F1 by $+0.7$ to $+9.7$ points in $10$ of $12$ (cell, baseline) combinations. A companion five-sentinel audit shows the conventional single-\texttt{[MASK]} probe is itself sentinel-fragile: on 2Wiki it reports a $+4.12$~F1 ``non-leakage residual'' that flips to $-3.33$ to $-7.81$~F1 under four alternative sentinels and fails an equivalence test for three of those four ($1/4$~pass). We do not propose a new rewriter or mitigation; we release the intervention runner and the sentinel panel so that other rewriter-gain claims can be tested against the same standard.
The authors have withdrawn this manuscript after identifying errors in the experimental analysis reported in Sections 3 and 4. These errors affect the reported relationship between answer presence and RAG rewriting gains and undermine the paper's main conclusions. Therefore, the results and conclusions in the current version should not be relied upon
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2606.05633 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2606.05633v2 [cs.AI] for this version)
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