FCPRAG: Fusion-Controller Parametric Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Stable Multi-Passage LoRA Injection

Jinchang Zhu, Jindong Li, YI Ding, Nie Xiaojian, Rong Fu, Shuangyong Song, Haowei He, Menglin Yang


Abstract
Parametric retrieval-augmented generation (PRAG) injects retrieved evidence into a large language model (LLM) through passage-specific LoRA adapters, reducing reliance on long in-context prompts. When multiple passages are retrieved for the same query, however, evidence-level fusion becomes a bottleneck: equal-weight merging can amplify weak or conflicting evidence, and translating retrieval signals into fusion weights often requires fragile global tuning. We propose FCPRAG, a fusion-controlled parametric RAG framework that adds a lightweight controller for retrieval-conditioned, sample-level adapter fusion. The controller predicts per-passage fusion scores together with sample-level calibration signals, including a mixing gate and an adaptive temperature, enabling fusion that stays selective under informative retrieval signals and conservative under uncertainty. FCPRAG is trained with merge-aware supervision derived from each adapter’s marginal contribution within a multi-adapter merge, using training data only. We further show that a single dataset-level temperature is suboptimal under heteroscedastic retrieval uncertainty, motivating sample-level adaptation. Experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, PopQA, and ComplexWebQuestions (CWQ) across three LLM backbones show that FCPRAG consistently improves F1 over standard RAG and parametric RAG baselines, with gains of up to 4.65% on 2WikiMultiHopQA and 7.55% on CWQ, while also reducing tuning cost and improving robustness under retrieval perturbations. Code is available at https://github.com/ReinerBRO/FCPRAG.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1473
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
31337–31356
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1473/
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Cite (ACL):
Jinchang Zhu, Jindong Li, YI Ding, Nie Xiaojian, Rong Fu, Shuangyong Song, Haowei He, and Menglin Yang. 2026. FCPRAG: Fusion-Controller Parametric Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Stable Multi-Passage LoRA Injection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 31337–31356, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FCPRAG: Fusion-Controller Parametric Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Stable Multi-Passage LoRA Injection (Zhu et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1473.pdf