Weβre finally back with our weekly curated collections of the most interesting research papers, resources, and tools on topics that have been especially popular in the community. In 2025, the most popular collections were focused on policy optimization techniques, reinforcement learning, model architectures, and reading resources.
Interestingly, when we were posting our previous collections here, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) was one of the hottest topics. And this week, weβre lucky to see some truly exciting new research on RAG β destiny, perhaps :)
So letβs take a look at 12 recent advanced approaches to RAG:
Mindscape-Aware RAG (MiA-RAG) helps RAG systems handle long documents by first building a high-level summary of the whole text. This βglobal viewβ is then used to guide what the system retrieves and how it answers, helping it connect scattered evidence and reason more like a human reading a long document. β Read more
Multi-step RAG with Hypergraph-based Memory: HGMem is a new memory design that enhances multi-step RAG. It organizes retrieved information as a hypergraph, allowing facts to connect and combine over time. This helps the model build structured knowledge, reason more coherently, and better understand complex contexts. β Read more
QuCo-RAG is a dynamic RAG method that decides when to retrieve information based on statistics from the modelβs pretraining data, not model confidence. It flags rare or suspicious entities and checks whether they co-occur in real data, triggering retrieval to reduce hallucinations and improve factual accuracy. β Read more
HiFi-RAG is a hierarchical RAG pipeline that filters retrieved documents in multiple stages before generation. It uses Gemini 2.5 Flash to reformulate queries, prune irrelevant passages, and attach citations, then relies on Gemini 2.5 Pro only for final answer generation. β Read more
Bidirectional RAG allows controlled write-back to the retrieval corpus. Generated answers are added only if they pass grounding checks, including NLI-based entailment, source attribution verification, and novelty detection. This lets the system expand its knowledge base during use without polluting it with hallucinations. β Read more
TV-RAG is a training-free RAG framework for long videos that adds time awareness to retrieval. It ranks retrieved text using temporal offsets and selects key video frames with entropy-based sampling, helping video language models align visual, audio, and subtitle information and reason more accurately over long video timelines. β Read more
MegaRAG is built around multimodal knowledge graphs for long documents like books. It extracts entities and relations from text and visuals, builds a hierarchical graph, and uses it during retrieval and generation. This helps the model reason globally and answer both text and visual questions more accurately. β Read more
AffordanceRAG is a zero-shot, multimodal RAG system for mobile robots. It builds an affordance-aware memory from images of explored environments, retrieves objects and locations using visual and regional features, and reranks them with affordance scores to select actions the robot can physically execute, improving real-world manipulations. β Read more
Graph-O1 is an agent-based GraphRAG system for question answering over text-attributed graphs. Instead of reading the whole graph at once, it uses Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and reinforcement learning (RL) to explore only the most relevant nodes and edges step by step, enabling efficient, structured reasoning within LLM context limits. β Read more
SignRAG is a zero-shot road sign recognition system built on RAG. It uses a visionβlanguage model to describe a sign image, retrieves similar sign designs from a vector database, and then lets an LLM reason over the candidates to identify the correct sign, without task-specific training. β Read more
Hybrid RAG for Multilingual Document Question Answering is a multilingual RAG system for question answering over noisy historical newspapers. It handles OCR errors and language drift using semantic query expansion, multi-query retrieval with Reciprocal Rank Fusion, and a grounded generation prompt that only answers when evidence exists. β Read more
RAGPart and RAGMask are lightweight defenses against RAG corpus poisoning attacks. RAGPart limits the influence of malicious documents by exploiting how dense retrievers learn from partitioned data, and RAGMask flags suspicious documents by masking tokens and detecting abnormal similarity shifts, without modifying the generation model. β Read more
