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Beyond Semantic Relevance: Counterfactual Risk Minimization for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

sigir26-107 · Full research paper · Peiyang Liu, Qiang Yan, Ziqiang Cui, Di Liang, Xi Wang, Wei Ye
Bias Mitigation Methods · 50% Evidence Selection and Context Refin · 25% Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness · 25%
Abstract

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems predominantly rely on semantic relevance as a proxy for utility. However, this assumption collapses in realistic decision-making scenarios where user queries are laden with cognitive biases, such as false premises or confirmation bias. In such cases, maximizing relevance paradoxically promotes the retrieval of sycophantic evidence that reinforces hallucinations, a critical failure we term the "Relevance-Robustness Gap". To bridge this gap, we propose CoRM-RAG (Counterfactual Risk Minimization for RAG), a framework that aligns retrieval with decision safety rather than mere similarity. Grounded in causal intervention, we introduce a Cognitive Perturbation Protocol to simulate user biases during training, which is then distilled into a lightweight Evidence Critic. This scoring module learns to identify documents that possess sufficient evidential strength to steer the model toward correctness despite adversarial query perturbations. Extensive experiments on decision-making benchmarks demonstrate that CoRM-RAG significantly outperforms strong dense retrievers and LLM-based rerankers in adversarial settings, while enabling effective risk-aware abstention through reliable robustness scoring. Our code is available at https://github.com/PeiYangLiu/CoRM-RAG.git.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Yu-An Liu 0028
57
60 Attack-in-the-Chain: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for Attacks Against Black-Box Neural Ranking Models (2025) Robustness and Adversarial IR
60 Robust Neural Information Retrieval: An Adversarial and Out-of-Distribution Perspective (2026) Robustness and Adversarial IR
60 Topic-oriented Adversarial Attacks against Black-box Neural Ranking Models (2023) Robustness and Adversarial IR
2 Yujia Zhou 0002
47
58 Grounding Language Model with Chunking-Free In-Context Retrieval (2024) Generative Retrieval
58 CorpusLM: Towards a Unified Language Model on Corpus for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2024) Generative Retrieval
55 Robust Fine-tuning for Retrieval Augmented Generation against Retrieval Defects (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
3 Andrew Parry
44
60 Analyzing Adversarial Attacks on Sequence-to-Sequence Relevance Models (2024) Robustness and Adversarial IR
60 Axiomatic Guidance for Efficient and Controlled Neural Search (2024) Robustness and Adversarial IR
58 Constructing and Evaluating Declarative RAG Pipelines in PyTerrier (2025) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Xiaoxi Li 0005 51
Area-chair candidates (7)
Xiaoxi Li 0005 assigned 5115 papers
Xiaoxue Zang 464 papers
Jun Xu 0001 442 papers
Hongjin Qian 4412 papers
Zhijing Wu 0001 419 papers
Fernando Diaz 0001 4012 papers
Kam-Fai Wong 396 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Yu-An Liu 0028 assigned 57 3
60 Attack-in-the-Chain: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for Attacks Against Black-Box Neural Ranking Models (2025) Robustness and Adversarial IR
60 Robust Neural Information Retrieval: An Adversarial and Out-of-Distribution Perspective (2026) Robustness and Adversarial IR
3 Jing Liu 0022 50 3
68 Reinforced Informativeness Optimization for Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
56 REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
4 Sunhao Dai 48 3
68 Unifying Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval: New Challenges in the LLM Era (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods
68 Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval Systems: New Challenges in the LLM Era (2024) Bias Mitigation Methods
5 Weiwei Sun 0001 47 3
56 Direct Retrieval-augmented Optimization: Synergizing Knowledge Selection and Language Models (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
55 Contrastive Learning Reduces Hallucination in Conversations (2023) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
6 Yujia Zhou 0002 assigned 47 3
58 Grounding Language Model with Chunking-Free In-Context Retrieval (2024) Generative Retrieval
58 CorpusLM: Towards a Unified Language Model on Corpus for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2024) Generative Retrieval
7 Di Wu 0054 47 3
55 Synchronous Faithfulness Monitoring for Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
53 LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval
9 Jialong Wu 0007 45 3
68 Causal Prompting: Debiasing Large Language Model Prompting Based on Front-Door Adjustment (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods
50 WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
10 Sara Allawati 45 3
68 VulGen: Workshop on Vulnerabilities in Generative Systems for Information Retrieval (2026) Bias Mitigation Methods
32 A Comparative Analysis of Linguistic and Retrieval Diversity in LLM-Generated Search Queries (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
11 Hao Liu 0078 44 3
68 Mitigating Fine-tuning Bias: A Parameter-Efficient Debiasing Framework for Large Language Models (2026) Bias Mitigation Methods
33 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment
13 Andrew Parry assigned 44 3
60 Analyzing Adversarial Attacks on Sequence-to-Sequence Relevance Models (2024) Robustness and Adversarial IR
60 Axiomatic Guidance for Efficient and Controlled Neural Search (2024) Robustness and Adversarial IR
15 Xiao Zhang 0034 43 3
55 ReDeEP: Detecting Hallucination in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Mechanistic Interpretability (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
55 LargePiG for Hallucination-Free Query Generation: Your Large Language Model is Secretly a Pointer Generator (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
16 Jinheon Baek 42 3
55 Efficient Real-time Refinement of Language Model Text Generation (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
53 Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
17 Kaixin Ma 42 3
68 Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
55 Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
18 Xi Ye 0003 42 3
55 Effective Large Language Model Adaptation for Improved Grounding and Citation Generation (2024) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
39 Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
19 Navve Wasserman 42 3
48 DocReRank: Single-Page Hard Negative Query Generation for Training Multi-Modal RAG Rerankers (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval
48 REAL-MM-RAG: A Real-World Multi-Modal Retrieval Benchmark (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval
20 Weipeng Chen 41 3
58 RichRAG: Crafting Rich Responses for Multi-faceted Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
56 HtmlRAG: HTML is Better Than Plain Text for Modeling Retrieved Knowledge in RAG Systems (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
21 Keqin Bao 41 3
63 Item-side Fairness of Large Language Model-based Recommendation System (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization
50 Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation (2023) Preference Alignment and Optimization
23 Idan Szpektor 40 3
54 DisentQA: Disentangling Parametric and Contextual Knowledge with Counterfactual Question Answering (2023) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
40 MDCure: A Scalable Pipeline for Multi-Document Instruction-Following (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
25 Shuaiqiang Wang 40 3
56 Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
39 Model Editing for New Document Integration in Generative Information Retrieval (2026) Generative Retrieval
26 Qinggang Zhang 40 3
55 FaithfulRAG: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling for Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
40 You Don't Need Pre-Built Graphs for RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Adaptive Reasoning Structures (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
27 Yifan Wang 0017 40 3
60 Improving Long-tail User CTR Prediction via Hierarchical Distribution Alignment (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods
59 Intersectional Two-sided Fairness in Recommendation (2024) Popularity Bias and Long-Tail Debiasing
28 Venktesh V 40 3
58 The Surprising Effectiveness of Rankers trained on Expanded Queries (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
54 Reproducing Adaptive Reranking for Reasoning-Intensive IR (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
29 Daiting Shi 40 3
57 Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
50 RAG-Enhanced Large Language Models for Dynamic Content Expiration Prediction in Web Search (2026) Information Retrieval and Ranking › Others
30 Ori Yoran 40 3
66 Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
41 Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
31 Shu Zhou 0002 40 3
48 Calibrating Uncertainty with Cross-Model Consistency for LLM Hallucination Mitigation (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
48 Cascaded Verification Framework: A Progressive Approach for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
32 Negar Arabzadeh 40 3
58 Can QPP Choose the Right Query variant? Evaluating Query Variant Selection for RAG Pipelines (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
38 MS MARCO Chameleons: Challenging the MS MARCO Leaderboard with Extremely Obstinate Queries (2021) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
33 Xinyu Ma 0001 40 3
56 Direct Retrieval-augmented Optimization: Synergizing Knowledge Selection and Language Models (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
41 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
34 Shijie Wang 0002 39 3
63 CheatAgent: Attacking LLM-Empowered Recommender Systems via LLM Agent (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization
50 Multi-Agent Attacks for Black-Box Social Recommendations (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods
36 Qingyi Si 39 3
63 Compressing and Debiasing Vision-Language Pre-Trained Models for Visual Question Answering (2023) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks
55 Breaking the Trade-Off Between Faithfulness and Expressiveness for Large Language Models (2026) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
37 Han Li 0005 39 3
56 QE-RAG: A Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmark for Query Entry Errors (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
41 Towards Context-aware Reasoning-enhanced Generative Searching in E-commerce (2026) Recommendation with Search and Ranking