Kaichen Zhou

Author directory

2026

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has advanced open-domain question answering by incorporating external information into model reasoning. However, raw retrieved content often suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio, where answer-supportive information is diluted by irrelevant material, and error accumulation, where incomplete or misleading content degrades multi-hop reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose EviNoteRAG, a framework that enhances RAG through quality-augmented evidence notes. The model is trained to generate Supportive-Evidence Notes (SENs), concise abstractions that preserve only answer-critical information and explicitly highlight key and uncertain content to improve reasoning accuracy. To further ensure note quality, we introduce an entailment-based Evidence Quality Reward (EQR), which incentivizes SENs to be logically sufficient for deriving the correct answer. Experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that EviNoteRAG achieves state-of-the-art performance, with relative F1 gains of 20% on HotpotQA (+0.093), 40% on Bamboogle (+0.151), and 91% on 2Wiki (+0.256), while also improving training stability and efficiency.