Weitao Li
2026
UR2 : Unify RAG and Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning
Weitao Li | Boran Xiang | Xiaolong Wang | Jingyi Ren | Ante Wang | Zhinan Gou | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Weitao Li | Boran Xiang | Xiaolong Wang | Jingyi Ren | Ante Wang | Zhinan Gou | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities through two complementary paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for knowledge grounding and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for complex reasoning. However, existing attempts to unify these paradigms remain narrow in scope, typically limited to open-domain QA with fixed retrieval settings, which constrains generalization to broader domains. To address this limitation, we propose **UR2** (**U**nified **R**AG and **R**easoning), a general reinforcement learning framework that dynamically coordinates retrieval and reasoning. UR2 introduces two key designs: a difficulty-aware curriculum that selectively invokes retrieval only for challenging instances, and a hybrid knowledge access strategy that combines domain-specific offline corpora with on-the-fly LLM-generated summaries. Together, these components mitigate the imbalance between retrieval and reasoning and improve robustness to noisy information. Experiments on open-domain QA, MMLU-Pro, medical, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that UR2, built on Qwen-2.5-3/7B and LLaMA-3.1-8B, consistently outperforms existing RAG and RL baselines, and achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini on several benchmarks. We will release all code, models, and data.
Beyond "I Don’t Know": Evaluating LLM Self-Awareness in Discriminating Data and Model Uncertainty
Jingyi Ren | Ante Wang | Yunghwei Lai | Xiaolong Wang | Linlu Gong | Weitao Li | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jingyi Ren | Ante Wang | Yunghwei Lai | Xiaolong Wang | Linlu Gong | Weitao Li | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reliable Large Language Models (LLMs) should abstain when confidence is insufficient. However, prior studies often treat refusal as a generic "I don’t know”, failing to distinguish input-level ambiguity (data uncertainty) from capability limitations (model uncertainty). This lack of distinction limits downstream action decisions like requesting clarification or invoking external tools.In this work, we introduce UA-Bench, a benchmark of over 3,500 questions drawn from six datasets spanning knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks, designed to evaluate explicit uncertainty attribution.An evaluation of 18 frontier LLMs shows that even state-of-the-art models struggle to reliably discriminate between data uncertainty and model uncertainty, and that high answer accuracy does not necessarily imply strong uncertainty attribution ability.To narrow this gap, we propose a lightweight data synthesis and reinforcement learning strategy. Experiments on both Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 and Qwen3-8B in thinking mode show that the proposed method improves uncertainty attribution while preserving answer accuracy.Our code and data are publicly available now.
2025
Efficient Dynamic Clustering-Based Document Compression for Retrieval-Augmented-Generation
Weitao Li | Xiangyu Zhang | Kaiming Liu | Xuanyu Lei | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Weitao Li | Xiangyu Zhang | Kaiming Liu | Xuanyu Lei | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for knowledge injection during large language model (LLM) inference in recent years. However, due to their limited ability to exploit fine-grained inter-document relationships, current RAG implementations face challenges in effectively addressing the retrieved noise and redundancy content, which may cause error in the generation results. To address these limitations, we propose an **E**fficient **D**ynamic **C**lustering-based document **C**ompression framework (**EDC2-RAG**) that utilizes latent inter-document relationships while simultaneously removing irrelevant information and redundant content. We validate our approach, built upon GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o-mini, on widely used knowledge-QA and Hallucination-Detection datasets. Experimental results show that our method achieves consistent performance improvements across various scenarios and experimental settings, demonstrating strong robustness and applicability. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/EDC-2-RAG.
2024
Citation-Enhanced Generation for LLM-based Chatbots
Weitao Li | Junkai Li | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Weitao Li | Junkai Li | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful general intelligence across diverse scenarios, including their integration into chatbots. However, a vital challenge of LLM-based chatbots is that they may produce hallucinated content in responses, which significantly limits their applicability. Various efforts have been made to alleviate hallucination, such as retrieval augmented generation and reinforcement learning with human feedback, but most of them require additional training and data annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel post-hoc Citation-Enhanced Generation (CEG) approach combined with retrieval argumentation. Unlike previous studies that focus on preventing hallucinations during generation, our method addresses this issue in a post-hoc way. It incorporates a retrieval module to search for supporting documents relevant to the generated content, and employs a natural language inference-based citation generation module. Once the statements in the generated content lack of reference, our model can regenerate responses until all statements are supported by citations. Note that our method is a training-free plug-and-play plugin that is capable of various LLMs. Experiments on various hallucination-related datasets show our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both hallucination detection and response regeneration on three benchmarks. Our code and datasets can be found at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/CEG.