Augmenting LLM Reasoning with Dynamic Notes Writing for Complex QA
Authors: name: Rishabh Maheshwary; name: Masoud Hashemi; name: Khyati Mahajan; name: Shiva Krishna Reddy Malay; name: Sai Rajeswar; name: Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan; name: Spandana Gella; name: Vikas Yadav
Published: 2025-05-22 06:45:05

Abstract: Iterative RAG for multi-hop question answering faces challenges with lengthy
contexts and the buildup of irrelevant information. This hinders a model's
capacity to process and reason over retrieved content and limits performance.
While recent methods focus on compressing retrieved information, they are
either restricted to single-round RAG, require finetuning or lack scalability
in iterative RAG. To address these challenges, we propose Notes Writing, a
method that generates concise and relevant notes from retrieved documents at
each step, thereby reducing noise and retaining only essential information.
This indirectly increases the effective context length of Large Language Models
(LLMs), enabling them to reason and plan more effectively while processing
larger volumes of input text. Notes Writing is framework agnostic and can be
integrated with different iterative RAG methods. We demonstrate its
effectiveness with three iterative RAG methods, across two models and four
evaluation datasets. Notes writing yields an average improvement of 15.6
percentage points overall, with minimal increase in output tokens.