Adaptive Retrieval for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission10719 Authors

Keywords: re-ranking, adaptive retrieval

Abstract: We study leveraging adaptive retrieval to ensure sufficient ``bridge'' documents are retrieved for reasoning-intensive retrieval. Bridge documents are those that contribute to the reasoning process yet are not directly relevant to the initial query. While existing reasoning-based reranker pipelines attempt to surface these documents in ranking, they suffer from bounded recall. Naive solution with adaptive retrieval into these pipelines often leads to planning error propagation. To address this, we propose REPAIR, a framework that bridges this gap by repurposing reasoning plans as dense feedback signals for adaptive retrieval. Our key distinction is enabling mid-course correction during reranking through selective adaptive retrieval, retrieving documents that support the pivotal plan. Experimental results on reasoning-intensive retrieval and complex QA tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines by 5.6\%pt.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Information Extraction and Retrieval

Research Area Keywords: passage retrieval, re-ranking

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 10719