Papers › ClueAnchor: Clue-Anchored Knowledge Reasoning Exploration and Optimization for...
ClueAnchor: Clue-Anchored Knowledge Reasoning Exploration and Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Hao Chen, Yukun Yan, Sen Mei, Wanxiang Che, Zhenghao Liu, Qi Shi, Xinze Li, Yuchun Fan, Pengcheng Huang, Qiushi Xiong, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) augments Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge to improve factuality. However, existing RAG systems frequently underutilize the retrieved documents, failing to extract and integrate the key clues needed to support faithful and interpretable reasoning, especially in cases where relevant evidence is implicit, scattered, or obscured by noise. To address this issue, we propose ClueAnchor, a novel framework for enhancing RAG via clue-anchored reasoning exploration and optimization. ClueAnchor extracts key clues from retrieved content and generates multiple reasoning paths based on different knowledge configurations, optimizing the model by selecting the most effective one through reward-based preference optimization. Experiments show that ClueAnchor significantly outperforms prior RAG baselines in reasoning completeness and robustness. Further analysis confirms its strong resilience to noisy or partially relevant retrieved content, as well as its capability to identify supporting evidence even in the absence of explicit clue supervision during inference.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections