Artificial Intelligence · 13.08.2026, 05:25 UTC
CAR: Query-Guided Confidence-Aware Reranking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Artificial Intelligence |
| Quelle | arXiv cs.CL ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 13.08.2026 UTC |
Sicherheitsmeldung mit Schweregrad noch nicht bewertet. Technische Details im Tab „Originaltext“; empfohlene Schritte in der Checkliste.
arXiv:2605.04495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance. Relevance, however, is not equivalent to generator-side usefulness: a relevant passage may introduce ambiguity or distraction, whereas a lower-ranked passage may stabilize the generator's answer. We present CAR (Confidence-Aware Reranking), a training-free rank-correction framework that uses query-only answer stability as a control and measures each candidate by the change it induces in sampled-answer semantic stability. This controlled contrast estimates a document's marginal contribution to generator behavior without treating semantic stability as relevance or calibrated correctness. CAR converts these confidence changes into coarse precedence constraints and returns the feasible ranking with minimum Kendall distance from the baseline, preserving existing pairwise preferences unless generator-side evidence supports reversing them. Experiments on NQ, HotpotQA and FEVER across sparse and dense retrievers, seven ranking methods and three generator families show robust improvements. In the BM25-centered main analysis, CAR achieves a \textbf{+5.53\% mean relative NDCG@5 gain}; on the fixed NQ-answerable downstream evaluation, it improves token-level F1 by \textbf{+0.43 points}, with ranking and generation gains strongly aligned across rankers ($\rho = 0.93$). These results position CAR as a deployment-friendly, …