CounterRefine: Answer-Conditioned Counterevidence Retrieval for Inference-Time Knowledge Repair in Factual Question Answering
In factual question answering, many errors are not failures of access but failures of commitment: the system retrieves relevant evidence, yet still settles on the wrong answer. We present CounterRefine, a lightweight repair layer for short-form RAG that treats the first answer as a hypothesis to test. Given a draft, CounterRefine issues answer-conditioned expansion queries to retrieve candidate-specific evidence, then applies a constrained KEEP or REVISE refinement step whose proposed revisions are accepted only after deterministic validation. The design is intentionally narrow: it adds one evidence-gathering pass and one guarded refinement call rather than replacing the retriever or buil...
| Authors | Tianyi Huang, Ying Kai Deng |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.