English

RVR: Retrieve-Verify-Retrieve for Comprehensive Question Answering

Computation and Language 2026-02-23 v1 Information Retrieval

Abstract

Comprehensively retrieving diverse documents is crucial to address queries that admit a wide range of valid answers. We introduce retrieve-verify-retrieve (RVR), a multi-round retrieval framework designed to maximize answer coverage. Initially, a retriever takes the original query and returns a candidate document set, followed by a verifier that identifies a high-quality subset. For subsequent rounds, the query is augmented with previously verified documents to uncover answers that are not yet covered in previous rounds. RVR is effective even with off-the-shelf retrievers, and fine-tuning retrievers for our inference procedure brings further gains. Our method outperforms baselines, including agentic search approaches, achieving at least 10% relative and 3% absolute gain in complete recall percentage on a multi-answer retrieval dataset (QAMPARI). We also see consistent gains on two out-of-domain datasets (QUEST and WebQuestionsSP) across different base retrievers. Our work presents a promising iterative approach for comprehensive answer recall leveraging a verifier and adapting retrievers to a new inference scenario.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.18425,
  title  = {RVR: Retrieve-Verify-Retrieve for Comprehensive Question Answering},
  author = {Deniz Qian and Hung-Ting Chen and Eunsol Choi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18425},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

18 pages, 12 figures, 12 tables