Method Drift

Living systematic review

Retrieval-augmented generation

Grounding LLM generation in retrieved documents — retrieval, reranking, graph/recursive indexing, self-correction, and robustness of the retrieve-then-generate pipeline.

664 papers · 1,433 critique receipts · 6,345 benchmark results · updated Jun 18, 2026

Most-superseded baselines

Ranked by how many distinct papers critique or beat each method. These are the standard baselines newer work routinely measures against.

  1. 1
    RAG· RAG
    RAG+: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Application-Aware Reasoning

    69 papers critique it · 79 beat it on benchmarks

  2. 3
    Self-RAG· Self-RAG
    Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection

    26 papers critique it · 40 beat it on benchmarks

  3. 4
    LightRAG· RAG

    15 papers critique it · 24 beat it on benchmarks

  4. 5
    RAPTOR· RAG
    RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval

    7 papers critique it · 21 beat it on benchmarks

  5. 6
    FLARE· Self-RAG
    Active Retrieval Augmented Generation

    11 papers critique it · 14 beat it on benchmarks

  6. 9
    IRCoT· RAG

    4 papers critique it · 19 beat it on benchmarks

  7. 10
    BM25· BM25

    6 papers critique it · 16 beat it on benchmarks

  8. 11
    CRAG· Self-RAG
    Corrective Retrieval Augmented Generation

    11 papers critique it · 11 beat it on benchmarks

  9. 12
    ReAct· RAG
    ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models

    6 papers critique it · 15 beat it on benchmarks

Sub-problems

Methods that compete on the same benchmarks cluster into distinct sub-problems.

RAG · 369 methods

RAG · GraphRAG · LightRAG · RAPTOR · HippoRAG 2 · IRCoT

Self-RAG · 245 methods

Self-RAG · FLARE · CRAG · Adaptive-RAG · Iter-RetGen · DRAGIN

BM25 · 123 methods

BM25 · DPR · ColBERT · RankRAG · Contriever · KG²RAG

RECOMP · 97 methods

RECOMP · LongLLMLingua · LLMLingua · CompAct · ICAE · xRAG

MMGraphRAG · 112 methods

MMGraphRAG · Video-RAG · VisRAG · RAG-Anything · KG-RAG · MiniCPM (OCR)

RobustRAG · 62 methods

RobustRAG · TrustRAG · Astute RAG · ReliabilityRAG · PPL · PromptGuard

RetRobust · 60 methods

RetRobust · RAFT · RAAT · Ret-Robust · LLM-Embedder · PA-RAG

PoisonedRAG · 48 methods

PoisonedRAG · Joint-GCG · AgentPoison · BadChain · Context-Agnostic Attack · GARAG

AutoRAG · 30 methods

AutoRAG · ReARTeR · FastRAG · LlamaIndex · DeepRAG · RAG-Star

RAG-DDR · 17 methods

RAG-DDR · Emotion-LLaMA · PandaGPT · Video-LLaMA · Video-LLaMA 2 · VideoChat

The frontier

Recent methods not yet superseded in the knowledge base.