2025/05/28 by Hoang Pham, Pham, Hoang, Thuy-Duong Nguyen +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Databases (cs.DB) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Power Systems and Technologies #Semantic Web and Ontologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.22571
openalex publication_date 2025/05/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper presents a novel approach for unified retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems using the recent emerging large language model (LLM) agent concept. Specifically, Agent LLM, which utilizes LLM as fundamental controllers, has become a promising approach to enable the interpretability of RAG tasks, especially for complex reasoning question-answering systems (e.g., multi-hop queries). Nonetheless, previous works mainly focus on solving RAG systems with either single-hop or multi-hop approaches separately, which limits the application of those approaches to real-world applications. In this study, we propose a trainable agent framework called Agent-UniRAG for unified retrieval-augmented LLM systems, which enhances the effectiveness and interpretability of RAG systems. The main idea is to design an LLM agent framework to solve RAG tasks step-by-step based on the complexity of the inputs, simultaneously including single-hop and multi-hop queries in an end-to-end manner. Furthermore, we introduce SynAgent-RAG, a synthetic dataset to enable the proposed agent framework for small open-source LLMs (e.g., Llama-3-8B). The results show comparable performances with closed-source and larger open-source LLMs across various RAG benchmarks. Our source code and dataset are publicly available for further exploitation.