SIRERAG: INDEXING SIMILAR AND RELATED INFORMATION FOR MULTIHOP REASONING

Indexing is an important step towards strong performance in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. However, existing methods organize data based on either semantic similarity (similarity) or related information (relatedness), but do not cover both perspectives comprehensively. Our analysis reveals that modeling only one perspective results in insufficient knowledge synthesis, leading to suboptimal performance on complex tasks requiring multihop reasoning. In this paper, we propose SIRERAG, a novel RAG indexing approach that explicitly considers both similar and related information. On the similarity side, we follow existing work and explore some variances to construct a similarity tree based on recursive summarization. On the relatedness side, SIRERAG extracts propositions and entities from texts, groups propositions via shared entities, and generates recursive summaries to construct a relatedness tree. We index and flatten both similarity and relatedness trees into a unified retrieval pool. Our experiments demonstrate that SIRERAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art indexing methods on three multihop datasets (MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and HotpotQA), with an average 1.9% improvement in F1 scores. As a reasonably efficient solution, SIRERAG enhances existing reranking methods significantly, with up to 7.8% improvement in average F1 scores. Our code is available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/SiReRAG.