Predictable Failure in Multi-Hop Retrieval: Score-Distributional Confidence Scoring and Abstention

Paper recorded by Signals 4 on 2026-09-18 in cs.LG. Abstract reproduced from arXiv; link to the original below.

Published 2026-09-18 on arXiv · recorded by Signals 4 on 2026-09-21

Category: cs.LG · 机器学习 · first seen 2026-09-21

Abstract

Multi-hop retrieval failures are not uniformly distributed across queries: they cluster in structurally predictable subpopulations. We prove two results formalizing this structure. First (CWAR Reducibility): confident-failure reduction is achievable if and only if retrieval features carry mutual information about success, a condition satisfied by LLM-judge pipelines but substantially weaker in den

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