Challenge: Retrieval-Augmented Generation models fail to rank the most relevant documents at the top . conventional retrieval methods fail to find the most important documents .
Approach: They propose a new method for scoring retrieved documents using zero-shot answer scent based on a pre-trained large language model to compute the likelihood of document-derived answers aligning with the answer scent.
Outcome: The proposed method improves top-1 retrieval accuracy on NQ, TriviaQA, WebQA, ArchivalQA, HotpotQA, and Entity Questions.

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InfoGain-RAG: Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Document Information Gain-based Reranking and Filtering (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks struggle with identifying whether retrieved documents meaningfully contribute to answer generation.
Approach: They propose a document-related metric to quantify the contribution of retrieved documents to correct answer generation.
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Improving Passage Retrieval with Zero-Shot Question Generation (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing re-ranking methods for open-domain question answering are not domain- or task-specific.
Approach: They propose a simple and effective re-ranking method for improving passage retrieval in open-domain question answering.
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GENRA: Enhancing Zero-shot Retrieval with Rank Aggregation (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to perform zero-shot document retrieval, a process that typically consists of two steps: retrieving relevant documents, and re-ranking them based on their relevance to the query.
Approach: They propose a new approach to zero-shot document retrieval that incorporates rank aggregation to improve retrieval effectiveness.
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Question Decomposition for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is effective for question answering tasks . multi-hop questions, such as "Which company among NVIDIA, Apple, and Google made the biggest profit in 2023?" challenge RAG because relevant facts are often distributed across multiple documents .
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RaFe: Ranking Feedback Improves Query Rewriting for RAG (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved to enhance document retrieval by reformulating queries.
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RE-RAG: Improving Open-Domain QA Performance and Interpretability with Relevance Estimator in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to retrieval augmented generation (RAG) are based on parametric knowledge and external knowledge.
Approach: They propose a weakly supervised method for training a relevance estimator (RE) that provides relative relevance between contexts as previous rerankers did, and provides confidence, which can be used to classify whether given context is useful for answering the given question.
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Uplift-RAG: Uplift-Driven Knowledge Preference Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing efforts to estimate document utility rely on downstream generation performance, which conflates the influence of external documents with the intrinsic knowledge of the LLM.
Approach: They propose an uplift-based definition of document utility that quantifies each document’s marginal benefit over the LLM’s internal knowledge.
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Test-time Corpus Feedback: From Retrieval to RAG (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines treat retrieval and reasoning as isolated components, limiting performance on complex tasks.
Approach: They propose to integrate large language models with retrieval to improve query quality . they also propose to use feedback to improve the query, retrieved context, or document pool .
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MrRank: Improving Question Answering Retrieval System through Multi-Result Ranking Model (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing IR techniques contain deficiencies, posing a performance bottleneck . combining diverse approaches to retrieve information is a viable strategy .
Approach: They propose an approach that leverages learning-to-rank techniques to combine heterogeneous IR systems.
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ListT5: Listwise Reranking with Fusion-in-Decoder Improves Zero-shot Retrieval (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing listwise reranking models rely on pointwise sizing of each passage . Until now, listwise models lack the ability to compare between passages at inference time .
Approach: They propose a listwise reranking approach based on Fusion-in-Decoder that handles multiple candidate passages at train and inference time.
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