Teja Gollapudi


2025

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PrismRAG: Boosting RAG Factuality with Distractor Resilience and Strategized Reasoning
Mohammad Kachuee | Teja Gollapudi | Minseok Kim | Yin Huang | Kai Sun | Xiao Yang | Jiaqi Wang | Nirav Shah | Yue Liu | Aaron Colak | Anuj Kumar | Wen-tau Yih | Xin Luna Dong
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) often falls short when retrieved context includes confusing semi-relevant passages, or when answering questions require deep contextual understanding and reasoning. We propose an efficient fine-tuning framework, called PrismRAG, that (i) trains the model with distractor-aware QA pairs mixing gold evidence with subtle distractor passages, and (ii) instills reasoning-centric habits that make the LLM plan, rationalize, and synthesize without relying on extensive human engineered instructions. Evaluated across 12 open-book RAG QA benchmarks spanning diverse application domains and scenarios, PrismRAG improves average factuality by 5.4%, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions. Our method is being deployed in production.