Papers with iterative retrieval
ImReasoner: Improving Memory-based Language Models for Reasoning-in-a-Haystack Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Ching-Yun Ko, Payel Das, Sihui Dai, Georgios Kollias, Subhajit Chaudhury, Aurelie C. Lozano, Pin-Yu Chen
| Challenge: | despite advances, large language models exhibit brittleness on tasks that require multi-step reasoning over long contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to explicitly encode contexts as ordered memory and perform iterative retrieval to construct reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks fail to show emergent reasoning generalization in a weakly supervised scenario . the proposed framework is based on a synthetic benchmark to stress-test the models . |
Reasoning over Public and Private Data in Retrieval-Based Systems (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval systems assume relevant corpora are fully (e.g., publicly) accessible, but users are often unwilling to expose their private data to entities hosting public data. |
| Approach: | They propose a split iterative retrieval problem involving iterating retrieval over multiple privacy scopes and propose 'concurrentQA' benchmark to test this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the existing retrieval methods but still suffers performance degradations when applied to a dataset from a public and private distribution. |
Data-Centric Perspectives on Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at natural language understanding and generation, yet rely on static pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment Large Language Models with external retrieval to ground model outputs . traditional RAG is constrained by a fixed retrieve-then-generate routine . authors aim to guide creation of high-quality datasets for next generation of adaptive LLM agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can decompose tasks, issue exploratory queries, and refine evidence through iterative retrieval. |
PAR2-RAG: Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Multi-hop question answering is a practical bottleneck in industry applications . large language models (LLMs) fail frequently when evidence coverage is incomplete or reasoning trajectories drift . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free two-stage framework that separates coverage from commitment . it performs breadth-first anchoring to build a high-recall evidence frontier . compared with IRCoT, it achieves 23.5% higher answer accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in MHQA benchmarks and achieves 23.5% higher answer accuracy and 10.5% NDCG gains in retrieval quality. |
Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Zheng Chu, Huiming Fan, Jingchang Chen, Qianyu Wang, Mingda Yang, Jiafeng Liang, Zhongjie Wang, Hao Li, Guo Tang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, but they still face challenges in knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses self-critique feedback to guide iterative reasoning by enabling iteration and self-evaluation of its intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA by 8.6% on three multi-hop reasoning datasets. |
AMA: Adaptive Memory via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.findings-acl)
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Weiquan Huang, Zixuan Wang, Hehai Lin, Sudong Wang, Bo Xu, Qian Li, Beier Zhu, Linyi Yang, Chengwei Qin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to longterm memory rely on rigid retrieval granularity, accumulation-heavy maintenance strategies, and coarse-grained update mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages coordinated agents to manage memory across multiple granularities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks while reducing token consumption by approximately 80%. |
Learning to Retrieve Iteratively for In-Context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yunmo Chen, Tongfei Chen, Harsh Jhamtani, Patrick Xia, Richard Shin, Jason Eisner, Benjamin Van Durme
| Challenge: | In-context learning is a powerful tool for learning large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative retrieval framework that empowers retrievers to make iterable decisions through policy optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on semantic parsing datasets with 4M additional parameters for state encoding. |
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. |
Rerank Before You Reason: Analyzing Reranking Tradeoffs through Effective Token Cost in Deep Search Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work emphasizes improving efficiency in LLM-based systems, especially for longcontext and multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They analyze the role of listwise reranking in deep search pipelines and compare their results to a novel ETC metric to determine model scale and reasoning effort. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scale, reasoning effort, reranking depth, and total token cost (ETC) metric improve retrieval and end-to-end accuracy and moderate reranked agents achieve comparable accuracy at substantially lower cost. |
DualRAG: A Dual-Process Approach to Integrate Reasoning and Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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Rong Cheng, Jinyi Liu, Yan Zheng, Fei Ni, Jiazhen Du, Hangyu Mao, Fuzheng Zhang, Bo Wang, Jianye Hao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering struggle to identify and organize dynamic knowledge . et al., 2023; Liu e.t. al. 2023) suggest a dual-process framework for multi-step reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a synergistic dual-process framework that integrates reasoning and retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves answer accuracy and coherence even in smaller-scale models. |
Verbal-R3: Verbal Reranker as the Missing Bridge between Retrieval and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are suboptimal due to exposure bias, a mismatch between pre-training data distribution and retrieved information. |
| Approach: | They propose to bridge retrieval results and the LLM’s reasoning ability through Verbal Annotations, analytic narratives that explicitly articulate the logical connection between a search query and retrieved contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on complex Question Answering benchmarks validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework. |