Beyond Semantic Relevance: Counterfactual Risk Minimization for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation
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
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 51 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 assigned | 51 | 15 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 46 | 4 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 44 | 2 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian | 44 | 12 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 41 | 9 papers | |
| Fernando Diaz 0001 | 40 | 12 papers | |
| Kam-Fai Wong | 39 | 6 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |