# Influence Guided Context Selection for Effective Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21359/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG pipeline design and evaluation, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 48 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG pipeline design and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-pipeline-design-and-evaluation/)

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Data Shapley: Equitable Valuation of Data for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02868/) (2019)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [Parameterized Explainer for Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04573/) (2020)
- [Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01558/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09542/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17563/) (2023)
- [RECOMP: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LMs with Compression and Selective Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04408/) (2023)
- [ASQA: Factoid Questions Meet Long-Form Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06092/) (2022)
- [RankRAG: Unifying Context Ranking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02485/) (2024)
- [Discovering Invariant Rationales for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12872/) (2022)
- [FlashRAG: A Modular Toolkit for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13576/) (2024)
- [Improving Passage Retrieval with Zero-Shot Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07496/) (2022)
- [RQ-RAG: Learning to Refine Queries for Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00610/) (2024)
- [Training Data Influence Analysis and Estimation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04612/) (2022)
- [Long-Context LLMs Meet RAG: Overcoming Challenges for Long Inputs in RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05983/) (2024)
- [Causal Attention for Interpretable and Generalizable Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15089/) (2021)
- [DsDm: Model-Aware Dataset Selection with Datamodels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12926/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Less is More for RAG: Information Gain Pruning for Generator-Aligned Reranking and Evidence Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17532/) (2026)
- [Revisiting RAG Retrievers: An Information Theoretic Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21553/) (2026)
- [DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11616/) (2026)
- [Context-Picker: Dynamic context selection using multi-stage reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14465/) (2025)
- [When Context Misleads: Intent-Guided Decoding for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16515/) (2026)
- [Downstream-Aware Context Selection for Online In-Context Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33166/) (2026)
- [Recall What Is Missing: Composing Evidence from Long-Term Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15642/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses large language model (LLM) hallucinations by grounding responses in external knowledge, but its effectiveness is compromised by poor-quality retrieved contexts containing irrelevant or noisy information. While existing approaches attempt to improve performance through context selection based on predefined context quality assessment metrics, they show limited gains over standard RAG. We attribute this limitation to their failure in holistically utilizing available information (query, context list, and generator) for comprehensive quality assessment. Inspired by recent advances in data selection, we reconceptualize context quality assessment as an inference-time data valuation problem and introduce the Contextual Influence Value (CI value). This novel metric quantifies context quality by measuring the performance degradation when removing each context from the list, effectively integrating query-aware relevance, list-aware uniqueness, and generator-aware alignment. Moreover, CI value eliminates complex selection hyperparameter tuning by simply retaining contexts with positive CI values. To address practical challenges of label dependency and computational overhead, we develop a parameterized surrogate model for CI value prediction during inference. The model employs a hierarchical architecture that captures both local query-context relevance and global inter-context interactions, trained through oracle CI value supervision and end-to-end generator feedback. Extensive experiments across 8 NLP tasks and multiple LLMs demonstrate that our context selection method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, effectively filtering poor-quality contexts while preserving critical information. Code is available at https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/RAG-CSM.