PonsRAG: A Pons-Inspired RAG Bridging Cognitive Islands for Coordinated Long Narrative Reasoning

Abstract:Long Narrative Reasoning is an essential capability for processing and reasoning over complex narratives. While retrieval-augmented generation provides a promising framework, existing methods still face two critical challenges: cognitive islanding and cross-layer evidence disconnection. To address these issues, we propose PonsRAG, a coordinated RAG framework inspired by the biological pons. PonsRAG consists of two key components: Triple-Layer Indexing, which organizes documents into a connected knowledge structure to bridge cognitive islands, and Coordinated Reasoning, which retrieves evidence across distinct layers and integrates cross-layer information into a unified context. We evaluate PonsRAG on four long-context narrative benchmarks, and experimental results show that it outperforms the strongest baseline, achieving a 11.56% relative improvement in average accuracy on multi-choice tasks.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.25486 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.25486v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25486 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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