Challenge: Currently, one-step retrieve-and-read question answering systems cannot answer such questions because they rarely contain retrievable clues about the missing entity.
Approach: They propose a multi-step approach to retrieve relevant content with the question, then reading the paragraphs returned by the information retrieval component to arrive at the final answer.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the best previously published model despite not using pretrained language models such as BERT.

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Don’t Forget the Base Retriever! A Low-Resource Graph-based Retriever for Multi-hop Question Answering (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing GraphRAG approaches to multi-hop question answering rely on expensive LLM calls.
Approach: They propose a lightweight, low-resource, multi-step graph-based retriever for multi-hop QA that performs multi- step retrieval in a few hundred milliseconds.
Outcome: The proposed retriever outperforms conventional retrievers on multi-hop QA datasets and shows strong potential as a base retriever within multi-step agentic frameworks.
PullNet: Open Domain Question Answering with Iterative Retrieval on Knowledge Bases and Text (D19-1)

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Challenge: Experimentally PullNet improves over the prior state-of-the-art open domain question answering systems.
Approach: They propose a framework for learning what to retrieve and reasoning with heterogeneous information to find the best answer.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves over the prior state-of-the-art in open domain question answering . it is weakly supervised, requiring question-answer pairs but not gold inference paths .
Simple yet Effective Bridge Reasoning for Open-Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (D19-58)

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Challenge: Existing work on open-domain multi-hop question answering relies on off-the-shelf information retrieval techniques to retrieve answer passages.
Approach: They propose a new subproblem for open-domain multi-hop question answering . they aim to recognize the anchor from a set of start passages with a reading comprehension model .
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves the baseline method on the open-domain hotpotQA benchmark.
Answering Open-Domain Questions of Varying Reasoning Steps from Text (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a new benchmark is developed to answer open-domain questions from text . the system uses a single multi-task transformer model to perform all the necessary subtasks .
Approach: They develop a unified system to answer directly from open-domain questions . they use a single multi-task transformer model to perform all the necessary subtasks .
Outcome: The proposed system can answer open-domain questions on any text collection without prior knowledge of reasoning complexity.
End-to-End Beam Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing beam retrieval frameworks for multi-hop question answering were customized for two-hop questions and were poorly supervised.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end beam retrieval framework for multi-hop question answering . they combine an encoder and two classification heads to optimize the retrieval process .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on MuSiQue-Ans and surpasses all previous retrievers on HotpotQA and achieves 99.9% precision on 2WikiMultiHopQA.
KiRAG: Knowledge-Driven Iterative Retriever for Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Iterative retrieval-augmented generation models are difficult to use for multihop question answering (QA) . their retrieval processes can be disrupted by irrelevant documents or factually inaccurate chain-of-thoughts .
Approach: They propose a knowledge-driven iterative retriever model that decomposes documents into knowledge triples and performs iterativ retrieval with these triples to enable a factually reliable retrieval process.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing iRAG models with an average improvement of 9.40% in R@3 and 5.14% in F1 on multi-hop QA datasets.
Open Domain Question Answering over Tables via Dense Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in open-domain QA focus on retrieving textual passages . a retriever designed to handle tabular context can improve retrieval quality .
Approach: They propose a tabular-based retrieval model that improves retrieval quality over a BERT-based retriever.
Outcome: The proposed retriever improves retrieval quality with mined hard negatives over a BERT-based retriever.
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.
Outcome: The proposed method is effective and robust on limited data and computational resources.
C-MORE: Pretraining to Answer Open-Domain Questions by Consulting Millions of References (2022.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to pretrain open-domain question answering systems lack task-specific annotations.
Approach: They propose to pretrain a two-stage open-domain question answering system with strong transfer capabilities by using a dictionary and a large-scale corpus.
Outcome: The proposed approach leads to 2%-10% gains in top-20 accuracy and improves with reader.
Multi-Hop Paragraph Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for textual question answering are capable of outperforming humans on certain tasks.
Approach: They propose a method for retrieving multiple supporting paragraphs from a large knowledge base.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art over two well-known datasets, SQuAD-Open and HotpotQA, which serve as benchmarks for the proposed method.

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