From Association to Causation: Improving Retrieval Precision of Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Causal Relations and an Attention Mechanism
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM generation on retrieved documents, but the standard terminal retrieval stage--dense-vector similarity, optionally followed by reranking--often returns documents that share keywords with the query without containing the needed information, a failure mode that grows with the knowledge base. We trace it to a conceptual gap: similarity captures only associational relations, whereas the documents that matter are linked to the query causally. We model the terminal retrieval stage with a causal graph grounded in Reichenbach's common cause principle: the keywords shared by the query and a retrieved document form a latent common cause A, and the document's residual keywords form a latent set B linking the document to the ideal output. Since a retrieved document is a collider (A -> d <- B), retrieval itself opens an associational path between the query and B, which licenses a training-free, attention-style re-scoring rule: the cosine similarity between the query embedding and the weighted centroid embedding of B. Unlike causality-enhanced RAG variants that model causal relations inside the knowledge content, our graph models the causal structure of the retrieval process itself. On a real 471-document enterprise knowledge base, the method promotes a relevant guideline from rank 6 to the top 3; on a controlled diagnostic corpus reproducing the keyword-stuffing regime, it improves the mean target rank from 2.88 to 1.25, while a trained cross-encoder reranker barely helps (2.63). Conversely, on three BEIR benchmarks the score underperforms the similarity baseline, delineating the applicability boundary: the method guards the keyword-stuffing regime of growing proprietary knowledge bases and complements neural rerankers; a corpus-level calibration gate selects the correct regime with >= 95% reliability. A fully local testbed demonstrates deployability.