# RAG over Thinking Traces Can Improve Reasoning Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03344/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agentic RAG, agents and memory, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 35 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Agentic RAG, agents and memory](https://mlsanity.com/rag/agentic-rag-agents-and-memory/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [A Survey on RAG Meeting LLMs: Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06211/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Are Reasoning Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10071/) (2022)
- [Teaching Small Language Models to Reason](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08410/) (2022)
- [Distilling Reasoning Capabilities into Smaller Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00193/) (2022)
- [Improving the Domain Adaptation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02627/) (2022)
- [RAT: Retrieval Augmented Thoughts Elicit Context-Aware Reasoning in Long-Horizon Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05313/) (2024)
- [Scaling Retrieval-Based Language Models with a Trillion-Token Datastore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12854/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08446/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-augmented Generation to Improve Math Question-Answering: Trade-offs Between Groundedness and Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03184/) (2023)
- [Can Retriever-Augmented Language Models Reason? The Blame Game Between the Retriever and the Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09146/) (2022)
- [Retrieving Supporting Evidence for Generative Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11392/) (2023)
- [How Much Can RAG Help the Reasoning of LLM?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02338/) (2024)
- [Evidence-backed Fact Checking using RAG and Few-Shot In-Context Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12060/) (2024)
- [Can We Further Elicit Reasoning in LLMs? Critic-Guided Planning with Retrieval-Augmentation for Solving Challenging Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01428/) (2024)
- [Trajectory-Informed Memory Generation for Self-Improving Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10600/) (2026)
- [TRACE the Evidence: Constructing Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning Chains for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11460/) (2024)
- [Retrieval Meets Reasoning: Even High-school Textbook Knowledge Benefits Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20834/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-of-Thought: Efficient Reasoning via Reusing Thoughts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21743/) (2025)
- [Improving Assessment of Tutoring Practices using Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14594/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Multi-Agent Transactive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19911/) (2026)
- [Natural Language Query to Configuration for Retrieval Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27361/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective for knowledge-intensive tasks, but is widely believed to offer limited benefit for reasoning-intensive problems such as math and code generation. We challenge this assumption by showing that the limitation lies not in RAG itself, but in the choice of corpus. Instead of retrieving documents, we propose retrieving thinking traces, i.e., intermediate thinking trajectories generated during problem solving attempts. We show that thinking traces are already a strong retrieval source, and further introduce T3, an offline method that transforms them into structured, retrieval-friendly representations, to improve usability. Using these traces as a corpus, a simple retrieve-then-generate pipeline consistently improves reasoning performance across strong models and benchmarks such as AIME 2025--2026, LiveCodeBench, and GPQA-Diamond, outperforming both non-RAG baselines and retrieval over standard web corpora. For instance, on AIME 2025-2026, RAG with traces generated by Gemini-2-thinking achieves relative gains of +56.3%, +8.6%, and +7.6% for Gemini-2.5-Flash, GPT-OSS-120B, and GPT-5, respectively, even though these are more recent models. Overall, our results suggest that thinking traces are an effective retrieval corpus for reasoning tasks, and transforming them into structured, compact, or diagnostic representations unlocks even stronger gains. Code available at https://github.com/Narabzad/t3.