Current retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods struggle with complex multi-hop reasoning, relying on unstructured semantic matching that lacks the logical structure needed to systematically guide retrieval. We introduce Programmatic Retrieval Optimization with Generative Reasoning and Augmented Multi-queries (PROGRAM), a novel framework that elevates retrieval to structured, program-guided reasoning. PROGRAM treats retrieval as execution of specific program types, such as logical, temporal, causal, and so forth, through three stages of ’Program-Type Selection’ with dual-metric optimization, ’Iterative Active Program Pruning’ with evidence accumulation, and ’Final Answer Generation’ with reranking. Evaluated on five benchmarks including HotPotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, ARC-Challenge, MMLU-Pro, and MedQA with various LLMs, PROGRAM achieves state-of-the-art performance with up to 24% relative improvement on HotPotQA and 13.2% on MedQA over strong baselines including FLARE, ProbTree and Self-RAG.

Large language models with retrieval-augmented generation systematically underutilize evidence in the middle of multi-document contexts, a phenomenon known as Lost in the Middle. Existing mitigation strategies, such as document reordering and attention steering, can reduce boundary bias but remain brittle in noisy settings, where inaccurate relevance estimation and spurious documents still obscure useful evidence in central positions. We propose DuQUAD, a multi-document QA framework that mitigates positional bias through dual-view reasoning and quality-aware evidence pruning. DuQUAD combines a Local Agent guided by a Structural Fusion Score with a Global Agent that reasons over the full document set, providing both targeted evidence recovery and broad contextual understanding. The framework further filters candidate evidence using explicit quality scoring and refines it at the sentence level to reduce noise. DuQUAD consistently outperforms strong Lost-in-the-Middle mitigation baselines, including recent multi-agent and context optimization methods, improving accuracy by 3.9% on average over the strongest competing baseline and gold evidence recall by 9.4%, while substantially reducing computational cost compared to existing multi-agent frameworks.

Knowledge-intensive queries require accurate answers that are explicitly grounded in retrieved evidence. However, existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches often struggle with query complexity, suffer from propagated reasoning errors, or rely on incomplete or noisy retrieval, limiting their effectiveness. To address these limitations, we introduce UniRAG, a unified RAG framework that integrates entity-grounded query decomposition, break-down reasoning, and iterative query rewriting. Specifically, UniRAG decomposes queries into semantically coherent sub-queries, explicitly verifies retrieved sub-facts through a dedicated reasoning module, and adaptively refines queries based on identified knowledge gaps, significantly improving answer completeness and reliability. Extensive benchmark evaluations on complex question-answering datasets, including multi-hop HotPotQA and 2WikiMultihopQA, biomedical MedMCQA and MedQA, and fact-verification FEVER and SciFact, demonstrate that UniRAG consistently achieves performance improvements across various state-of-the-art LLMs, such as LLaMA-3.1-8B, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Gemini-1.5-Flash.