Rethinking Retrieval-Augmented Generation as a Cooperative Decision-Making Problem

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated strong effectiveness in knowledge-intensive tasks by grounding language generation in external evidence. Despite its success, many existing RAG systems are built based on a ranking-centric, asymmetric dependency paradigm, where the generation quality of the generator is highly dependent on reranking results of the reranker. To overcome this limitation, we reformulate RAG as a cooperative multi-agent decision-making problem and propose Cooperative Retrieval-Augmented Generation (CoRAG), a framework in which the reranker and the generator act as peer decision-makers rather than being connected through an asymmetric dependency pipeline. By jointly optimizing their behaviors toward a shared task objective, the reranker and generator are encouraged to cooperate, ensuring that document reranking and generation work in concert to improve the final response. Experimental results demonstrate good generalization and improved generation stability of CoRAG, even when the model is trained on only around 10K PopQA samples. Our model released in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CoRAG-D63F