English

Abductive Inference in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models: Generating and Validating Missing Premises

Computation and Language 2025-11-07 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with retrieval -- commonly referred to as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) -- have demonstrated strong performance in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, RAG pipelines often fail when retrieved evidence is incomplete, leaving gaps in the reasoning process. In such cases, \emph{abductive inference} -- the process of generating plausible missing premises to explain observations -- offers a principled approach to bridge these gaps. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates abductive inference into retrieval-augmented LLMs. Our method detects insufficient evidence, generates candidate missing premises, and validates them through consistency and plausibility checks. Experimental results on abductive reasoning and multi-hop QA benchmarks show that our approach improves both answer accuracy and reasoning faithfulness. This work highlights abductive inference as a promising direction for enhancing the robustness and explainability of RAG systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.04020,
  title  = {Abductive Inference in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models: Generating and Validating Missing Premises},
  author = {Shiyin Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.04020},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:23:54.691Z