Chunli Liu
2026
Re3: Relevance & Recency Retrieval for Mitigating Temporal Hallucination
Jiawei Cao | Jie Ouyang | Mingyue Cheng | Zhaomeng Zhou | Chunli Liu | Yupeng Li | Zirui Liu | Shijin Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiawei Cao | Jie Ouyang | Mingyue Cheng | Zhaomeng Zhou | Chunli Liu | Yupeng Li | Zirui Liu | Shijin Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a mainstream approach to mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet in dynamic real-world scenarios, such as weather forecasting or evolving news events, existing retrievers suffer from both temporal-semantic misalignment and outdated-document interference. To address this, we propose Relevance Recency Retrieval (Re3), a novel framework that mitigates temporal hallucinations via two core components: a Time-Aware Dual Relevance Encoder that embeds heterogeneous temporal signals into the semantic space to ensure retrieval fidelity, and a Conflict-Aware Recency Filter that performs listwise arbitration to identify and suppress obsolete factual versions. To rigorously evaluate this setting, we introduce Re2 Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising over 1.3 million instances designed to assess system robustness in realistic environments where temporal constraints and conflicting factual versions coexist. Experiments on three public benchmarks and Re2 Bench demonstrate that Re3 consistently outperforms the strongest baselines by an average of 9.7% in generation accuracy, with gains of up to 25.2% on challenging dynamic tasks, while demonstrating robustness across diverse RAG settings.