# Towards Global Retrieval Augmented Generation: A Benchmark for Corpus-Level Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26205/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 29 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)
- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG pipeline design and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-pipeline-design-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [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)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [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)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10509/) (2022)
- [MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00573/) (2021)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18059/) (2024)
- [Active Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06983/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Hallucination in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05922/) (2023)
- [From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14802/) (2025)
- [ReSearch: Learning to Reason with Search for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19470/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Graph Prompting for Multi-Document Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11730/) (2023)
- [HyperGraphRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Hypergraph-Structured Knowledge Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21322/) (2025)
- [KG-RAG: Bridging the Gap Between Knowledge and Creativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12035/) (2024)
- [OmniEval: An Omnidirectional and Automatic RAG Evaluation Benchmark in Financial Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13018/) (2024)
- [Customized Retrieval Augmented Generation and Benchmarking for EDA Tool Documentation QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15353/) (2024)
- [R3-RAG: Learning Step-by-Step Reasoning and Retrieval for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23794/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [MultiHaystack: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval and Reasoning over 40K Images, Videos, and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05697/) (2026)
- [Coverage, Not Averages: Semantic Stratification for Trustworthy Retrieval Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20763/) (2026)
- [Analytical Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11581/) (2026)
- [DocRetriever: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Multimodal Document Retrieval with Comprehensive Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30027/) (2026)
- [RAG-TESTER: Automated End-to-End Testing of Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00054/) (2026)
- [Doc-REFRAG: Rethinking Multimodal Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30163/) (2026)
- [Cognition on Graph: Navigating Massive Knowledge Space via Cognitive Cycles and Bidirectional Graph-Text Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12791/) (2026)
- [From Retrieval to Customer Context: Evaluating Frontier-Model Systems for Voice-of-Customer Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09375/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a leading approach to reducing hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). Current RAG evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on what we call local RAG: retrieving relevant chunks from a small subset of documents to answer queries that require only localized understanding within specific text chunks. However, many real-world applications require a fundamentally different capability -- global RAG -- which involves aggregating and analyzing information across entire document collections to derive corpus-level insights (for example, "What are the top 10 most cited papers in 2023?"). In this paper, we introduce GlobalQA -- the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate global RAG capabilities, covering four core task types: counting, extremum queries, sorting, and top-k extraction. Through systematic evaluation across different models and baselines, we find that existing RAG methods perform poorly on global tasks, with the strongest baseline achieving only 1.51 F1 score. To address these challenges, we propose GlobalRAG, a multi-tool collaborative framework that preserves structural coherence through chunk-level retrieval, incorporates LLM-driven intelligent filters to eliminate noisy documents, and integrates aggregation modules for precise symbolic computation. On the Qwen2.5-14B model, GlobalRAG achieves 6.63 F1 compared to the strongest baseline's 1.51 F1, validating the effectiveness of our method.