Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge into their input prompts. However, when the retrieved context contradicts the LLM’s parametric knowledge, it often fails to resolve the conflict between incorrect external context and correct parametric knowledge, known as context-memory conflict. To tackle this problem, we introduce Conflict-Aware REtrieval-Augmented Generation (CARE), consisting of a context assessor and a base LLM. The context assessor encodes external context into compact memory embeddings. Through grounded/adversarial soft prompting, the context assessor is trained to discern unreliable context and capture a guidance signal that directs reasoning toward the more reliable knowledge source. Extensive experiments show that CARE effectively mitigates context-memory conflicts, leading to an average performance gain of 5.0% on QA and fact-checking benchmarks, establishing a promising direction for trustworthy and adaptive RAG systems.

Non-factoid question answering (NFQA) poses a significant challenge due to its open-ended nature, diverse intents, and the necessity for multi-aspect reasoning, rendering conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches insufficient. To address this, we introduce Typed-RAG, a type-aware framework utilizing multi-aspect query decomposition tailored specifically for NFQA. Typed-RAG categorizes NFQs into distinct types—such as debate, experience, and comparison—and decomposes them into single-aspect sub-queries for targeted retrieval and generation. By synthesizing the retrieved results of these sub-queries, Typed-RAG generates more informative and contextually relevant responses. Additionally, we present Wiki-NFQA, a novel benchmark dataset encompassing diverse NFQ types. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that TypeRAG consistently outperforms baseline approaches, confirming the effectiveness of type-aware decomposition in improving both retrieval quality and answer generation for NFQA tasks.

In Open-domain Question Answering (ODQA), it is essential to discern relevant contexts as evidence and avoid spurious ones among retrieved results. The model architecture that uses concatenated multiple contexts in the decoding phase, *i.e.*, Fusion-in-Decoder, demonstrates promising performance but generates incorrect outputs from seemingly plausible contexts. To address this problem, we propose the ***M**ulti-**G**ranularity guided **F**usion-**i**n-**D**ecoder (**MGFiD**)*, discerning evidence across multiple levels of granularity. Based on multi-task learning, MGFiD harmonizes passage re-ranking with sentence classification. It aggregates evident sentences into an *anchor vector* that instructs the decoder. Additionally, it improves decoding efficiency by reusing the results of passage re-ranking for *passage pruning*. Through our experiments, MGFiD outperforms existing models on the Natural Questions (NQ) and TriviaQA (TQA) datasets, highlighting the benefits of its multi-granularity solution.