Efficient Prior-Guided Reasoning for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation under Conflicts
Xiaowei Yuan, Ziyang Huang, Zhao Yang Meituan, Yequan Wang Peking University and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Jun Zhao Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences
原文摘要
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard paradigm for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge. However, RAG performance often degrades substantially when faced with noisy, outdated, or conflicting retrieved information. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that Prior-Guided Reasoning—a strategy that explicitly elicits the model’s parametric knowledge as prior information to guide reasoning on retrieved documents—effectively mitigates the impact of external conflicts. Building on this, we propose BrPr (Bernoulli-gated reinforcement learning for Prior-Guided reasoning), a framework that achieves robust performance across varying degrees of external inconsistency. Furthermore, by employing a Bernoulli-gated dropout mechanism during training, BrPr distills the prior-driven reasoning capability into the model parameters, enabling efficient latent reasoning without explicit prior generation. The experimental results demonstrate that BrPr consistently exhibits superior robustness to external conflicts and noise.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表