# Separate the Wheat from the Chaff: Winnowing Down Divergent Views in Retrieval Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04700 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04700/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG pipeline design and evaluation, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 50 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 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 50)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [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)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11738/) (2023)
- [In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00083/) (2023)
- [Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07567/) (2021)
- [KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02252/) (2020)
- [Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07899/) (2021)
- [Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01558/) (2023)
- [ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13007/) (2023)
- [Debating with More Persuasive LLMs Leads to More Truthful Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06782/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13446/) (2024)
- [Rethinking the Bounds of LLM Reasoning: Are Multi-Agent Discussions the Key?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18272/) (2024)
- [RAGCache: Efficient Knowledge Caching for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12457/) (2024)
- [Examining Inter-Consistency of Large Language Models Collaboration: An In-depth Analysis via Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11595/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge sources to address their limitations in accessing up-to-date or specialized information. A natural strategy to increase the likelihood of retrieving relevant information is to expand the number of retrieved documents. However, involving more documents could introduce significant noise, as many documents may be irrelevant or misleading, thereby reducing the overall accuracy of the generated responses. To overcome the challenge associated with handling a larger number of documents, we propose WinnowRAG, a novel RAG framework designed to systematically filter out noisy documents while preserving valuable content -- a process we refer to as winnowing. WinnowRAG operates in two stages: In Stage I, we perform query-aware clustering to group similar documents and form distinct topic clusters. Each cluster is assigned to an LLM agent for generating a unique answer. In Stage II, we perform winnowing, wherein a critic LLM evaluates the outputs of multiple agents and iteratively separates useful documents from noisy ones. To retain useful documents when discarding agents, we propose two strategic merging techniques to ensure that only relevant knowledge is used for generating the final response. Crucially, WinnowRAG is model-agnostic and does not require any model fine-tuning, making it easily adaptable to various tasks. Extensive experiments on various realistic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of WinnowRAG over state-of-the-art baselines.