Linhao Ye
2025
Optimizing Question Semantic Space for Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Multi-hop Question Answering
Linhao Ye
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Lang Yu
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Zhikai Lei
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Qin Chen
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Jie Zhou
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Liang He
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is usually integrated into large language models (LLMs) to mitigate hallucinations and knowledge obsolescence. Whereas, conventional one-step retrieve-and-read methods are insufficient for multi-hop question answering, facing challenges of retrieval semantic mismatching and the high cost in handling interdependent subquestions. In this paper, we propose Optimizing Question Semantic Space for Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Multi-hop Question Answering (Q-DREAM). Q-DREAM consists of three key modules: (1) the Question Decomposition Module (QDM), which decomposes multi-hop questions into fine-grained subquestions; (2) the Subquestion Dependency Optimizer Module (SDOM), which models the interdependent relations of subquestions for better understanding; and (3) the Dynamic Passage Retrieval Module (DPRM), which aligns subquestions with relevant passages by optimizing the semantic embeddings.Experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate that Q-DREAM significantly outperforms existing RAG methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Notably, Q-DREAM also improves retrieval efficiency while maintaining high accuracy compared with recent baselines.