Breaking the Static Graph: Context-Aware Traversal for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Recent advances in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have shifted from simple vector similarity to structure-aware approaches like HippoRAG, which leverage Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and Personalized PageRank (PPR) to capture multi-hop dependencies. However, these methods suffer from a "Static Graph Fallacy": they rely on fixed transition probabilities determined during indexing. This rigidity ignores the query-dependent nature of edge relevance, causing semantic drift where random walks are diverted into high-degree "hub" nodes before reaching critical downstream evidence. Consequently, models often achieve high partial recall but fail to retrieve the complete evidence chain required for multi-hop queries. To address this, we propose CatRAG, Context-Aware Traversal for robust RAG, a framework that builds on the HippoRAG 2 architecture and transforms the static KG into a query-adaptive navigation structure. We introduce a multi-faceted framework to steer the random walk: (1) Symbolic Anchoring, which injects weak entity constraints to regularize the random walk; (2) Query-Aware Dynamic Edge Weighting, which dynamically modulates graph structure, to prune irrelevant paths while amplifying those aligned with the query's intent; and (3) Key-Fact Passage Weight Enhancement, a cost-efficient bias that structurally anchors the random walk to likely evidence. Experiments across four multi-hop benchmarks demonstrate that CatRAG consistently outperforms state of the art baselines. Our analysis reveals that while standard Recall metrics show modest gains, CatRAG achieves substantial improvements in reasoning completeness, the capacity to recover the entire evidence path without gaps. These results reveal that our approach effectively bridges the gap between retrieving partial context and enabling fully grounded reasoning. Resources are available at https://github.com/kwunhang/CatRAG.

R$^3$L: Reflect-then-Retry Reinforcement Learning with Language-Guided Exploration, Pivotal Credit, and Positive Amplification

Reinforcement learning drives recent advances in LLM reasoning and agentic capabilities, yet current approaches struggle with both exploration and exploitation. Exploration suffers from low success rates on difficult tasks and high costs of repeated rollouts from scratch. Exploitation suffers from coarse credit assignment and training instability: Trajectory-level rewards penalize valid prefixes for later errors, and failure-dominated groups overwhelm the few positive signals, leaving optimization without constructive direction. To this end, we propose R$^3$L, Reflect-then-Retry Reinforcement Learning with Language-Guided Exploration, Pivotal Credit, and Positive Amplification. To synthesize high-quality trajectories, R$^3$L shifts from stochastic sampling to active synthesis via reflect-then-retry, leveraging language feedback to diagnose errors, transform failed attempts into successful ones, and reduce rollout costs by restarting from identified failure points. With errors diagnosed and localized, Pivotal Credit Assignment updates only the diverging suffix where contrastive signals exist, excluding the shared prefix from gradient update. Since failures dominate on difficult tasks and reflect-then-retry produces off-policy data, risking training instability, Positive Amplification upweights successful trajectories to ensure positive signals guide the optimization process. Experiments on agentic and reasoning tasks demonstrate 5\% to 52\% relative improvements over baselines while maintaining training stability. Our code is released at https://github.com/shiweijiezero/R3L.

Grounded by Experience: Generative Healthcare Prediction Augmented with Hierarchical Agentic Retrieval

Accurate healthcare prediction is critical for improving patient outcomes and reducing operational costs. Bolstered by growing reasoning capabilities, large language models (LLMs) offer a promising path to enhance healthcare predictions by drawing on their rich parametric knowledge. However, LLMs are prone to factual inaccuracies due to limitations in the reliability and coverage of their embedded knowledge. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks, such as GraphRAG and its variants, have been proposed to mitigate these issues by incorporating external knowledge, they face two key challenges in the healthcare scenario: (1) identifying the clinical necessity to activate the retrieval mechanism, and (2) achieving synergy between the retriever and the generator to craft contextually appropriate retrievals. To address these challenges, we propose GHAR, a \underline{g}enerative \underline{h}ierarchical \underline{a}gentic \underline{R}AG framework that simultaneously resolves when to retrieve and how to optimize the collaboration between submodules in healthcare. Specifically, for the first challenge, we design a dual-agent architecture comprising Agent-Top and Agent-Low. Agent-Top acts as the primary physician, iteratively deciding whether to rely on parametric knowledge or to initiate retrieval, while Agent-Low acts as the consulting service, summarising all task-relevant knowledge once retrieval was triggered. To tackle the second challenge, we innovatively unify the optimization of both agents within a formal Markov Decision Process, designing diverse rewards to align their shared goal of accurate prediction while preserving their distinct roles. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets across three popular tasks demonstrate our superiority over state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the potential of hierarchical agentic RAG in advancing healthcare systems.

Pointing to a Llama and Call it a Camel: On the Sycophancy of Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in conducting conversations based on image inputs. However, we observe that MLLMs exhibit a pronounced form of visual sycophantic behavior. While similar behavior has also been noted in text-based large language models (LLMs), it becomes significantly more prominent when MLLMs process image inputs. We refer to this phenomenon as the "sycophantic modality gap." To better understand this issue, we further analyze the factors that contribute to the exacerbation of this gap. To mitigate the visual sycophantic behavior, we first experiment with naive supervised fine-tuning to help the MLLM resist misleading instructions from the user. However, we find that this approach also makes the MLLM overly resistant to corrective instructions (i.e., stubborn even if it is wrong). To alleviate this trade-off, we propose Sycophantic Reflective Tuning (SRT), which enables the MLLM to engage in reflective reasoning, allowing it to determine whether a user's instruction is misleading or corrective before drawing a conclusion. After applying SRT, we observe a significant reduction in sycophantic behavior toward misleading instructions, without resulting in excessive stubbornness when receiving corrective instructions.

Data-Aware Socratic Query Refinement in Database Systems

In this paper, we propose Data-Aware Socratic Guidance (DASG), a dialogue-based query enhancement framework that embeds \linebreak interactive clarification as a first-class operator within database systems to resolve ambiguity in natural language queries. DASG treats dialogue as an optimization decision, asking clarifying questions only when the expected execution cost reduction exceeds the interaction overhead. The system quantifies ambiguity through linguistic fuzziness, schema grounding confidence, and projected costs across relational and vector backends. Our algorithm selects the optimal clarifications by combining semantic relevance, catalog-based information gain, and potential cost reduction. We evaluate our proposed framework on three datasets. The results show that DASG demonstrates improved query precision while maintaining efficiency, establishing a cooperative analytics paradigm where systems actively participate in query formulation rather than passively translating user requests.

EraRAG: Efficient and Incremental Retrieval Augmented Generation for Growing Corpora

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Graph-RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by structuring retrieval over an external corpus. However, existing approaches typically assume a static corpus, requiring expensive full-graph reconstruction whenever new documents arrive, limiting their scalability in dynamic, evolving environments. To address these limitations, we introduce EraRAG, a novel multi-layered Graph-RAG framework that supports efficient and scalable dynamic updates. Our method leverages hyperplane-based Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to partition and organize the original corpus into hierarchical graph structures, enabling efficient and localized insertions of new data without disrupting the existing topology. The design eliminates the need for retraining or costly recomputation while preserving high retrieval accuracy and low latency. Experiments on large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that EraRag achieves up to an order of magnitude reduction in update time and token consumption compared to existing Graph-RAG systems, while providing superior accuracy performance. This work offers a practical path forward for RAG systems that must operate over continually growing corpora, bridging the gap between retrieval efficiency and adaptability. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/EverM0re/EraRAG-Official.

ExeSQL: Self-Taught Text-to-SQL Models with Execution-Driven Bootstrapping for SQL Dialects

Recent text-to-SQL models have achieved strong performance, but their effectiveness remains largely confined to SQLite due to dataset limitations. However, real-world applications require SQL generation across multiple dialects with varying syntax and specialized features, which remains a challenge for current models. The main obstacle in building a dialect-aware model lies in acquiring high-quality dialect-specific data. Data generated purely through static prompting - without validating SQLs via execution - tends to be noisy and unreliable. Moreover, the lack of real execution environments in the training loop prevents models from grounding their predictions in executable semantics, limiting generalization despite surface-level improvements from data filtering. This work introduces ExeSQL, a text-to-SQL framework with execution-driven, agentic bootstrapping. The method consists of iterative query generation, execution-based filtering (e.g., rejection sampling), and preference-based training, enabling the model to adapt to new SQL dialects through verifiable, feedback-guided learning. Experiments show that ExeSQL bridges the dialect gap in text-to-SQL, achieving average improvements of 15.2%, 10.38%, and 4.49% over GPT-4o on PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle, respectively, across multiple datasets of varying difficulty.

Towards DS-NER: Unveiling and Addressing Latent Noise in Distant Annotations

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) has emerged as a cheap and convenient alternative to traditional human annotation methods, enabling the automatic generation of training data by aligning text with external resources. Despite the many efforts in noise measurement methods, few works focus on the latent noise distribution between different distant annotation methods. In this work, we explore the effectiveness and robustness of DS-NER by two aspects: (1) distant annotation techniques, which encompasses both traditional rule-based methods and the innovative large language model supervision approach, and (2) noise assessment, for which we introduce a novel framework. This framework addresses the challenges by distinctly categorizing them into the unlabeled-entity problem (UEP) and the noisy-entity problem (NEP), subsequently providing specialized solutions for each. Our proposed method achieves significant improvements on eight real-world distant supervision datasets originating from three different data sources and involving four distinct annotation techniques, confirming its superiority over current state-of-the-art methods.

DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly trained on multi-domain datasets, where domain sampling strategies significantly impact model performance due to varying domain importance across downstream tasks. Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact. In this paper, we present Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling (DIDS). To ensure intra-domain consistency, a gradient clustering algorithm is proposed to group training data based on their learning effects, where a proxy language model and dimensionality reduction are employed to reduce computational overhead. To accurately measure domain impact, we develop a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) guided metric that quantifies how domain-specific parameter updates affect the model's output distributions on downstream tasks, with theoretical guarantees. Furthermore, to determine optimal sampling ratios, DIDS combines both the FIM-guided domain impact assessment and loss learning trajectories that indicate domain-specific potential, while accounting for diminishing marginal returns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIDS achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency.

A Pilot Empirical Study on When and How to Use Knowledge Graphs as Retrieval Augmented Generation

The integration of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) into the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework has attracted significant interest, with early studies showing promise in mitigating hallucinations and improving model accuracy. However, a systematic understanding and comparative analysis of the rapidly emerging KG-RAG methods are still lacking. This paper seeks to lay the foundation for systematically answering the question of when and how to use KG-RAG by analyzing their performance in various application scenarios associated with different technical configurations. After outlining the mind map using KG-RAG framework and summarizing its popular pipeline, we conduct a pilot empirical study of KG-RAG works to reimplement and evaluate 6 KG-RAG methods across 7 datasets in diverse scenarios, analyzing the impact of 9 KG-RAG configurations in combination with 17 LLMs. Our results underscore the critical role of appropriate application conditions and optimal configurations of KG-RAG components.