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arXiv · 2609.21924

What Should We Ask Next? Retrieval-Aware Question Learning under Partial Evidence

Lyucheng Qian·John Yuehan Zhang·Pingyu Wang
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Abstract

Interactive retrieval under partial evidence is a sequential information-acquisition problem: an agent must decide which question will create the most useful evidence for the next retrieval update. Existing systems train this decision by imitating an offline ordering of candidate QA pairs, although question value is determined by the response it elicits and its downstream effect on retrieval. We establish that candidate discriminativeness and perceived usefulness provide weak supervision for this objective, then introduce RAVEL, a retrieval-aware online reinforcement learning framework for interactive person re-identification. RAVEL initializes from supervised question generation, observes the current Top-4 candidates directly, and optimizes the question policy with rank feedback from the full question-answer-retrieval loop. Experiments on Interactive-PEDES show that RAVEL delivers progressively stronger retrieval performance across five interaction rounds. Further analysis shows that RAVEL reallocates the questioning budget toward localized open-ended attributes, which provide more useful retrieval evidence and yield the largest gains on initially difficult queries.

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Lyucheng Qian, John Yuehan Zhang, Pingyu Wang. 2026-09-18. What Should We Ask Next? Retrieval-Aware Question Learning under Partial Evidence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21924

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