| Challenge: | Decomposition-based multi-hop retrieval methods rely on autoregressive steps to break down complex queries, which breaks end-to-end differentiability and is computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-hop dense retrieval model that integrates causal language modeling with dense retrievals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on in-distribution and out-of-difference benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to augment language models with external knowledge but they are limited by static nature of pre-training data. |
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on long-context multi-hop question answering benchmarks show TAG achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
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Aggretriever: A Simple Approach to Aggregate Textual Representations for Robust Dense Passage Retrieval (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been successful in knowledge-intensive tasks, but recent research calls into question the robustness of these singlevector models. |
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Generative Multi-hop Retrieval (2022.emnlp-main)
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Resource-Friendly Dynamic Enhancement Chain for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Binquan Ji, Haibo Luo, YifeiLu YifeiLu, Lei Hei, Jiaqi Wang, Tingjing Liao, Wang Lingyu, Shichao Wang, Feiliang Ren
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Optimizing Multi-Hop Document Retrieval Through Intermediate Representations (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to addressing multi-hop queries are computationally expensive . despite their success, large language models often generate factually incorrect answers . |
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PAR2-RAG: Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2026.acl-industry)
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Think Parallax: Solving Multi-Hop Problems via Multi-View Knowledge-Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing KG-RAG systems collapse all reasoning hops into a single representation, flat embedding space, suppressing this implicit structure and causing noisy or drifted path exploration. |
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Weakly Supervised Pre-Training for Multi-Hop Retriever (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for weakly supervised multi-hop pretraining require costly human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for weakly supervised multi-hop retriever pretraining without human efforts by generating vector representations of complex questions and subquestion as weak supervision for pre-training. |
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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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