Answer Presence Drives RAG Rewriting Gains
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...
| Authors | Yuejie Li, Yueying Hua, Ke Yang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 4 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 August 2026 |
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