UniRAG: A Unified RAG Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Queries with Decomposition, Break-Down Reasoning, and Iterative Rewriting

Gun Il Kim, Jong Wook Kim, Beakcheol Jang


Abstract
Knowledge-intensive queries require accurate answers that are explicitly grounded in retrieved evidence. However, existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches often struggle with query complexity, suffer from propagated reasoning errors, or rely on incomplete or noisy retrieval, limiting their effectiveness. To address these limitations, we introduce UniRAG, a unified RAG framework that integrates entity-grounded query decomposition, break-down reasoning, and iterative query rewriting. Specifically, UniRAG decomposes queries into semantically coherent sub-queries, explicitly verifies retrieved sub-facts through a dedicated reasoning module, and adaptively refines queries based on identified knowledge gaps, significantly improving answer completeness and reliability. Extensive benchmark evaluations on complex question-answering datasets, including multi-hop HotPotQA and 2WikiMultihopQA, biomedical MedMCQA and MedQA, and fact-verification FEVER and SciFact, demonstrate that UniRAG consistently achieves performance improvements across various state-of-the-art LLMs, such as LLaMA-3.1-8B, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Gemini-1.5-Flash.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.1022
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18795–18810
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.findings-emnlp.1022/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1022
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gun Il Kim, Jong Wook Kim, and Beakcheol Jang. 2025. UniRAG: A Unified RAG Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Queries with Decomposition, Break-Down Reasoning, and Iterative Rewriting. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 18795–18810, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UniRAG: A Unified RAG Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Queries with Decomposition, Break-Down Reasoning, and Iterative Rewriting (Kim et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.findings-emnlp.1022.pdf
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