Atomic Information Flow: A Network Flow Model for Tool Attributions in RAG Systems
This addresses the need for explainability in scalable multi-agent RAG systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing network flow theory and model training techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of tracing responses back to specific tool components in RAG systems by introducing Atomic Information Flow (AIF), a network flow model that decomposes information into atoms for granular attribution, resulting in a 28.01-point accuracy boost to 82.71% on HotpotQA and 87.52% context token compression.
Many tool-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems lack precise mechanisms for tracing final responses back to specific tool components -- a critical gap as systems scale to complex multi-agent architectures. We present \textbf{Atomic Information Flow (AIF)}, a graph-based network flow model that decomposes tool outputs and LLM calls into atoms: indivisible, self-contained units of information. By modeling LLM orchestration as a directed flow of atoms from tool and LLM nodes to a response super-sink, AIF enables granular attribution metrics for AI explainability. Motivated by the max-flow min-cut theorem in network flow theory, we train a lightweight Gemma3 (4B parameter) language model as a context compressor to approximate the minimum cut of tool atoms using flow signals computed offline by AIF. We note that the base Gemma3-4B model struggles to identify critical information with \textbf{54.7\%} accuracy on HotpotQA, barely outperforming lexical baselines (BM25). However, post-training on AIF signals boosts accuracy to \textbf{82.71\%} (+28.01 points) while achieving \textbf{87.52\%} (+1.85\%) context token compression -- bridging the gap with the Gemma3-27B variant, a model nearly $7\times$ larger.