Verification Without Sufficiency: Per-Chunk Filtering Fails on Multi-Hop RAG, and Decomposition Repairs It
Verification for retrieval-augmented generation usually scores each retrieved chunk and drops the ones that fail. We show this cannot work for multi-hop questions, and show what does. Per-chunk scoring assumes one chunk is a sufficient premise for the answer. Multi-hop questions are built so that none is, and the paragraph carrying the answer is the one the question does not name. Entailment scoring reaches 0.643, 0.523 and 0.560 AUC on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA and MuSiQue, against 0.951 on single-hop SQuAD. Seven controls rule out model capacity, premise length, hypothesis template, decision threshold, retriever, answer-matching criterion and prompt. End to end across three datasets, th...
| Authors | Randhir Kumar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 August 2026 |
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