Ziyan Zhou
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Ziyan Zhou
2026
Mindscape-Aware Retrieval Augmented Generation for Improved Long Context Understanding
Yuqing Li | Jiangnan Li | Zheng Lin | Ziyan Zhou | Junjie Wu | Jie Zhou | Mo Yu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuqing Li | Jiangnan Li | Zheng Lin | Ziyan Zhou | Junjie Wu | Jie Zhou | Mo Yu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Humans understand long and complex texts by relying on a holistic semantic representation of the content. This global view helps organize prior knowledge, interpret new information, and integrate evidence dispersed across a document, as revealed by the Mindscape-Aware Capability of humans in psychology. However, current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often lack explicit global semantic guidance, making it difficult to retrieve and integrate dispersed evidence in long-context tasks. In this paper, we propose Mindscape-Aware RAG (MiA-RAG), the first framework to formulate mindscape-aware retrieval and generation as a unified conditioning paradigm for LLM-based RAG. MiA-RAG builds a mindscape through hierarchical summarization and conditions both retrieval and generation on this global semantic representation. This enables the retriever to form enriched query embeddings and the generator to reason over retrieved evidence within a coherent global context. We evaluate MiA-RAG across diverse long-context and bilingual benchmarks for evidence-based understanding and global sense-making. It consistently surpasses baselines, and further analysis shows that it aligns local details with a coherent global representation, enabling more human-like long-context retrieval and reasoning.