[Submitted on 17 Sep 2026]
Title:Sieve and Sage: Efficient Distraction Filtering for Reliable RALM Abstention
View a PDF of the paper titled Sieve and Sage: Efficient Distraction Filtering for Reliable RALM Abstention, by Jongbin Won and 2 other authors
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Abstract:Just as Socrates recognized the limits of his own knowledge, Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) should learn to abstain when the retrieved evidence cannot support a reliable response. Existing approaches largely rely on monolithic LLMs to handle heterogeneous retrieval failures in a single step, resulting in limited abstention performance and high computational costs. We instead decompose retrieval failures into two distinct states: (i) the unanswerable state, where the required evidence is absent, and (ii) the distracted state, where relevant evidence is mixed with conflicting, negated, or adversarial information. Based on this decomposition, we introduce a lightweight module (Sieve) that screens retrieved document sets for distracting evidence before invoking a costly LLM (Sage) for grounded generation and abstention. Evaluated across both general and high-stakes expert domains, our Sieve and Sage framework preemptively detects distracting noise, improving system accuracy by up to 69.4 percentage points and Macro-F1 by 55.2 percentage points compared to one-stage baselines. Furthermore, it achieves up to a 1.99x speedup, establishing a highly efficient and reliable abstention pipeline for RALM with abstention.
Comments: 20 pages, 6 figures, accepted at EMNLP 2026 Findings
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.35794 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2609.35794v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35794
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Jongbin Won [view email] [v1] Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:59:56 UTC (6,882 KB)
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