DynaKRAG: A Unified Framework for Learnable Evidence Control in Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract

Multi-hop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) acquires evidence sequentially, with each document contributing supporting facts, bridge entities, query refinements, or sufficient evidence for answering. Evidence acquisition can involve iterative retrieval, query reformulation, evidence assessment, and sufficiency checking. We introduce DynaKRAG, a unified evidence-action framework that learns a shared state-conditioned policy for coordinating these operations. At each step, a deterministic validity layer constructs the executable action set, a learned continuation gate selects between answer generation and further evidence acquisition, and a learned advantage scorer ranks feasible evidence operations by their predicted gain relative to immediate answer generation. The selected operation updates the shared state and may enable additional operations. Across HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and MuSiQue with Qwen2.5-7B, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.1-8B, DynaKRAG ranks first among the compared methods in both EM and F1 for all nine dataset--backbone pairs. Relative to matched-backbone baseline method, DynaKRAG improves F1 in every pair while achieving total-token efficiency gains of 10.1--34.3\% and retrieval-call efficiency gains of 15.1--43.4\%, establishing Pareto dominance under these measures. With Qwen2.5-7B, terminal evidence compression further improves answer quality across all three datasets while reducing the context passed to final answer generation by 54.4\%--71.5\%. These results demonstrate that unified, state-conditioned evidence control supports strong answer quality, efficient retrieval, and compact answer-generation contexts.