Rethinking the Reranker: Boundary-Aware Evidence Selection for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems remain brittle under realistic retrieval noise, even when the required evidence appears in the top-$K$ results. A key reason is that retrievers and rerankers optimize solely for relevance, often selecting either trivial, answer-revealing passages or evidence that lacks the critical information required to answer the question, without considering whether the evidence is suitable for the generator. We propose \texttt{BAR-RAG}, which reframes the reranker as a boundary-aware evidence selector that targets the generator’s Goldilocks Zone—evidence that is neither trivially easy nor fundamentally unanswerable for the generator, but is challenging yet sufficient for inference and thus provides the strongest learning signal. \texttt{BAR-RAG} trains the selector with reinforcement learning using generator feedback, and adopts a two-stage pipeline that fine-tunes the generator under the induced evidence distribution to mitigate the distribution mismatch between training and inference. Experiments on knowledge-intensive question answering benchmarks show that \texttt{BAR-RAG} consistently improves end-to-end performance under noisy retrieval, achieving an average gain of 10.3\% over strong RAG and reranking baselines while substantially improving robustness.