# From Ranking to Selection: A Simple but Efficient Dynamic Passage Selector for Retrieval Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Generation and context integration, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Generation and context integration](https://mlsanity.com/rag/generation-and-context-integration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00573/) (2021)
- [Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06713/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17563/) (2023)
- [Fine-Tuning LLaMA for Multi-Stage Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08319/) (2023)
- [Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06467/) (2020)
- [RankRAG: Unifying Context Ranking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02485/) (2024)
- [RankZephyr: Effective and Robust Zero-Shot Listwise Reranking is a Breeze!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02724/) (2023)
- [MemoRAG: Boosting Long Context Processing with Global Memory-Enhanced Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05591/) (2024)
- [Information Retrieval: Recent Advances and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08801/) (2023)
- [Learning to Rank in Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15222/) (2023)
- [LLM4Rerank: LLM-based Auto-Reranking Framework for Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12433/) (2024)
- [Improving Retrieval Augmented Language Model with Self-Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19813/) (2024)
- [Utilizing BERT for Information Retrieval: Survey, Applications, Resources, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00784/) (2024)
- [Aligning Vision to Language: Annotation-Free Multimodal Knowledge Graph Construction for Enhanced LLMs Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12972/) (2025)
- [Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Unifying Retrieval and Ranking with a Single Generative Recommendation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16454/) (2025)
- [Task-level Distributionally Robust Optimization for Large Language Model-based Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10613/) (2024)
- [Beyond Reproducibility: Advancing Zero-shot LLM Reranking Efficiency with Setwise Insertion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10509/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [How Many Tools Should an LLM Agent See? A Chance-Corrected Answer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24660/) (2026)
- [HetaRAG: Hybrid Deep Retrieval-Augmented Generation across Heterogeneous Data Stores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21336/) (2025)
- [FLOWREADER: Min-Cost Flow Optimization for Multi-Modal Long Document Q&A](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07235/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Retrieval-Augmentation as Synthesis: A Query-Aware Context Merging Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20286/) (2026)
- [Finding the Right Balance: Relevance and Diversity in LLM Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09412/) (2026)
- [SEEDS: Preview-Guided Evidence Admission for Search Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12932/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are often bottlenecked by their reranking modules, which typically score passages independently and select a fixed Top-K size. This approach struggles with complex multi-hop queries that require synthesizing evidence across multiple documents, creating a trade-off where small K values omit crucial information and large K values introduce noise. To address this, we introduce the Dynamic Passage Selector (DPS), a novel reranking framework that treats passage selection as a supervised learning problem. Unlike traditional point-wise or list-wise methods, DPS is fine-tuned to capture inter-passage dependencies and dynamically select the most relevant set of passages for generation. As a seamless plug-and-play module, DPS requires no modifications to the standard RAG pipeline. Comprehensive evaluations on five benchmarks show that DPS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art rerankers and fine-tuning methods. Notably, on the challenging MuSiQue dataset, DPS improves the F1-score by 30.06% and 15.4% over strong baselines like Qwen3-reranker and RankingGPT, respectively. Our results demonstrate that by enabling adaptive evidence selection, DPS substantially enhances reasoning capabilities in complex RAG scenarios.