Challenge: Existing evaluations of RAG systems ignore structural noise, authors say . complex layouts can cause OCR failures and disrupt semantic flow of text . advanced LLMs demonstrate robustness against local noise, but struggle to maintain reasoning capabilities under severe structural disruption that fragments global context.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate RAG robustness against OCR-induced structural perturbations.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark systematically injects three categories of real-world structural noise into a bilingual dataset of 2,132 question-answer pairs . results show that advanced LLMs demonstrate robustness against local noise, but struggle to maintain reasoning capabilities under severe structural disruption .

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When Good OCR Is Not Enough: Benchmarking OCR Robustness for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing OCR benchmarks rely on character-level metrics to measure downstream performance . high OCR accuracy does not translate into strong downstream performance, authors say .
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Enhancing Noise Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Adaptive Adversarial Training (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial capabilities yet face challenges such as hallucination, outdated knowledge, and untraceable reasoning processes.
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LLM-Generated Text May Harm Your Retrieval! A Robust Detection Strategy for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves accuracy and timeliness of large language models, but external corpora may become contaminated with LLM-generated texts.
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Challenge: Existing studies on the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) overlook the interconnected relationships between RAG components or the potential threats prevalent in real-world databases, such as minor textual errors.
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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation systems face persistent challenges in retrieval inefficiency and the inability of LLMs to filter out irrelevant information.
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Equipping Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Document Structure Awareness (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to retrieval-augmented generation ignore valuable structure that is crucial for document organization.
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Out of Style: RAG’s Fragility to Linguistic Variation (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: linguistic reformulations impact both retrieval and generation stages, leading to a relative performance drop of up to 40.41% for less formal queries and 38.86% for queries containing grammatical errors.
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Stable-RAG: Mitigating Retrieval-Permutation-Induced Hallucinations in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing RAG methods focus on enhancing LLM robustness to low-quality retrieval, but neither address permutation sensitivity.
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LONG2RAG: Evaluating Long-Context & Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Key Point Recall (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a promising approach to address limitations of fixed knowledge in large language models.
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ReflectiveRAG: Rethinking Adaptivity in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.eacl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) fail to assess evidence sufficiency, detect subtle mismatches or reduce redundancy.
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