# REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 48 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-robustness-and-adaptive-retrieval/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00083/) (2023)
- [Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00300/) (2019)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08191/) (2020)
- [Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01558/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14802/) (2025)
- [Sufficient Context: A New Lens on Retrieval Augmented Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06037/) (2024)
- [Process vs. Outcome Reward: Which is Better for Agentic RAG Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14069/) (2025)
- [RAG-RL: Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via RL and Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12759/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Data Agents: Emerging Paradigm or Overstated Hype?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23587/) (2025)
- [PropRAG: Guiding Retrieval with Beam Search over Proposition Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18070/) (2025)
- [Exploring Context Window of Large Language Models via Decomposed Positional Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18009/) (2024)
- [ReliabilityRAG: Effective and Provably Robust Defense for RAG-based Web-Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23519/) (2025)
- [CG-RAG: Research Question Answering by Citation Graph Retrieval-Augmented LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15067/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty Quantification in Retrieval Augmented Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18108/) (2025)
- [Understanding the Fundamental Design Decisions of Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19463/) (2024)
- [Beyond Early-Token Bias: Model-Specific and Language-Specific Position Effects in Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16134/) (2025)
- [Unveiling Knowledge Utilization Mechanisms in LLM-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11995/) (2025)
- [HyperbolicRAG: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hyperbolic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18808/) (2025)
- [Cooperative Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Question Answering: Mutual Information Exchange and Ranking by Contrasting Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10422/) (2025)
- [Differentially Private Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14374/) (2026)
- [Budget-Constrained Online Retrieval-Augmented Generation: The Chunk-as-a-Service Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26981/) (2026)
- [Efficient Dynamic Clustering-Based Document Compression for Retrieval-Augmented-Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03165/) (2025)
- [DACL-RAG: Data Augmentation Strategy with Curriculum Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10493/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Retrieval for RAG via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24652/) (2025)
- [HELP: HyperNode Expansion and Logical Path-Guided Evidence Localization for Accurate and Efficient GraphRAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20926/) (2026)
- [SAG: SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation with Query-Time Dynamic Hyperedges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15971/) (2026)
- [Struc-EMB: The Potential of Structure-Aware Encoding in Language Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08774/) (2025)
- [DMA: Online RAG Alignment with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04880/) (2025)
- [Stemming Hallucination in Language Models Using a Licensing Oracle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06073/) (2025)
- [Privacy-Preserving RAG via Multi-Agent Semantic Rewriting: Achieving Confidentiality Without Compromising Contextual Fidelity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24623/) (2026)
- [SAG: SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation with Query-Time Dynamic Hyperedges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12129/) (2026)
- [Asking for What Was Never Requested: Horizontal and Vertical Proactivity in Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37236/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Considering the limited internal parametric knowledge, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been widely used to extend the knowledge scope of large language models (LLMs). Despite the extensive efforts on RAG research, in existing methods, LLMs cannot precisely assess the relevance of retrieved documents, thus likely leading to misleading or even incorrect utilization of external knowledge (eg., retrieved documents). To address this issue, in this paper, we propose REAR, a RElevance-Aware Retrieval-augmented approach for open-domain question answering (QA). As the key motivation, we aim to enhance the self-awareness regarding the reliability of external knowledge for LLMs, so as to adaptively utilize external knowledge in RAG systems. Specially, we develop a novel architecture for LLM-based RAG systems, by incorporating a specially designed assessment module that precisely assesses the relevance of retrieved documents. Furthermore, we propose an improved training method based on bi-granularity relevance fusion and noise-resistant training. By combining the improvements in both architecture and training, our proposed REAR can better utilize external knowledge by effectively perceiving the relevance of retrieved documents. Experiments on four open-domain QA tasks show that REAR significantly outperforms previous a number of competitive RAG approaches. Our codes can be accessed at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/REAR.