Chronological index of RAG and its technical substrate

This is the complete chronological view of the primary-source registry as of 2026-08-09. It complements the explanatory chronology: that chapter follows causal architectural transitions, while this index makes all registered works—including parsing, chunking, sparse execution, ANN, ranking, evaluation, privacy, security, multimodal retrieval, memory, and serving—discoverable by first public date.

Dates are the earliest public date recorded in sources.json, not necessarily the later proceedings year. Status is explicit because an influential preprint or industry report is not equivalent to a peer-reviewed result. Entries link to an original paper, official proceedings page, or first-party program/report; the registry's title, date, venue, URL, status, and topics are the canonical metadata.

How to read the eras

1. 1971–2013: retrieval and indexing foundations. Relevance feedback, probabilistic term specificity, the vector-space model, BM25, passage segmentation, relevance models, dynamic pruning, RRF, PQ/OPQ, and ANN establish the substrate later RAG systems inherit.
2. 2014–2019: differentiable memory and open-domain retrieve/read. Memory Networks, DrQA, knowledge-grounded dialogue, graph QA, dense latent retrieval, kNN-LM, early BERT reranking, document expansion, DiskANN, and multi-hop benchmarks move external evidence into neural NLP.
3. 2020–2021: modern neural retrieval and retrieval-conditioned generation. REALM, DPR, RAG, FiD, ColBERT, ANCE, KILT, RocketQA, learned sparse search, RETRO, BEIR, ScaNN, SPANN, and training/distillation work define the modern stack.
4. 2022–2023: generalization, instruction, long-form attribution, and retrieval-aware control. Atlas, Contriever, E5/INSTRUCTOR/GTR, HyDE, FLARE, IRCoT, ALCE, Self-RAG, RAPTOR, and broader evaluation make retrieval more controllable and auditable.
5. 2024–2026: adaptive/agentic policies, graph and visual documents, reasoning-aware retrieval, memory, safety, and systems. The frontier learns whether/when/how to retrieve and stop, while evaluation exposes citation, freshness, poisoning, privacy, multimodal, long-context, and production trade-offs.

Cross-paper scores are not comparable merely because methods appear in the same year. Corpus snapshots, qrels, retrieval depth, generators, prompts, models, judges, and budgets differ. Use this index to find evidence, then read the mechanism and limitation analysis in the linked handbook chapter.

Registry summary

The index contains 203 works: 1 benchmark-program, 2 industry-report, 181 peer-reviewed, 19 preprint.

Most represented topic tags:

• benchmark — 26
• multi-hop — 12
• dense-retrieval — 12
• generation — 9
• efficiency — 9
• reranking — 9
• ann — 9
• pretraining — 8
• rag — 8
• multimodal — 8
• long-context — 8
• graph — 8
• evaluation — 8
• memory — 7
• reasoning — 7
• reinforcement-learning — 7
• citations — 7
• embeddings — 7
• retrieval — 6
• distillation — 6
• learned-sparse — 6
• security — 6
• privacy — 6
• routing — 5
• visual-rag — 5
• chunking — 5
• late-interaction — 4
• compression — 4
• iterative-retrieval — 4
• robustness — 4

Retrieval and indexing foundations (1971–2013)

1971

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
1	1971	Relevance Feedback in Information Retrieval	The SMART Retrieval System; peer-reviewed	relevance-feedback, query-expansion

1972

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
2	1972	A Statistical Interpretation of Term Specificity and Its Application in Retrieval	Journal of Documentation; peer-reviewed	tf-idf, sparse-retrieval

1975

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
3	1975	A Vector Space Model for Automatic Indexing	Communications of the ACM; peer-reviewed	vector-space, information-retrieval

1976

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
4	1976	Relevance Weighting of Search Terms	JASIS; peer-reviewed	probabilistic-ir, term-weighting

1994

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
5	1994-11	Okapi at TREC-3	TREC-3 / NIST SP 500-225; peer-reviewed	bm25, sparse-retrieval

1997

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
6	1997	TextTiling: Segmenting Text into Multi-Paragraph Subtopic Passages	Computational Linguistics; peer-reviewed	chunking, topic-segmentation

2001

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
7	2001	Relevance-Based Language Models	SIGIR 2001; peer-reviewed	rm3, pseudo-relevance-feedback, language-model-retrieval

2003

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
8	2003	Efficient Query Evaluation Using a Two-Level Retrieval Process	CIKM 2003; peer-reviewed	inverted-index, dynamic-pruning, wand

2009

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
9	2009	Reciprocal Rank Fusion Outperforms Condorcet and Individual Rank Learning Methods	SIGIR 2009; peer-reviewed	fusion, rrf

2011

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
10	2011	Faster Top-k Document Retrieval Using Block-Max Indexes	SIGIR 2011; peer-reviewed	inverted-index, dynamic-pruning
11	2011	Product Quantization for Nearest Neighbor Search	IEEE TPAMI; peer-reviewed	ann, quantization, compression

2013

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
12	2013	Optimized Product Quantization for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search	CVPR 2013; peer-reviewed	ann, quantization, rotation

Differentiable memory and open-domain retrieve/read (2014–2019)

2014

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
13	2014-10-15	Memory Networks	ICLR 2015; peer-reviewed	memory, multi-hop

2015

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
14	2015-03-31	End-To-End Memory Networks	NeurIPS 2015; peer-reviewed	memory, differentiable-retrieval

2016

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
15	2016	Efficient and Robust Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Using Hierarchical Navigable Small World Graphs	IEEE TPAMI; peer-reviewed	ann, hnsw, vector-index

2017

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
16	2017	Billion-scale Similarity Search with GPUs	IEEE Big Data 2017; peer-reviewed	ann, gpu, faiss
17	2017-03-31	Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions	ACL 2017; peer-reviewed	open-qa, tf-idf, reader

2018

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
18	2018	HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering	EMNLP 2018; peer-reviewed	multi-hop, benchmark, supporting-facts
19	2018	Open Domain Question Answering Using Early Fusion of Knowledge Bases and Text	EMNLP 2018; peer-reviewed	knowledge-graph, text, graph-neural-network
20	2018	Retrieve and Refine: Improved Sequence Generation Models for Dialogue	EMNLP SCAI 2018; peer-reviewed	generation, dialogue
21	2018	Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational Agents	ICLR 2019; peer-reviewed	dialogue, knowledge-grounding

2019

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
22	2019	Context-Aware Term Weighting for First Stage Passage Retrieval	SIGIR 2020; peer-reviewed	learned-sparse, term-weighting
23	2019	DiskANN: Fast Accurate Billion-point Nearest Neighbor Search on a Single Node	NeurIPS 2019; peer-reviewed	ann, disk, vector-index
24	2019	PullNet: Open Domain Question Answering with Iterative Retrieval on Knowledge Bases and Text	EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019; peer-reviewed	knowledge-graph, iterative-retrieval
25	2019-01	Passage Re-ranking with BERT	arXiv; preprint	reranking, cross-encoder
26	2019-04	Document Expansion by Query Prediction	arXiv; preprint	document-expansion, sparse-retrieval
27	2019-06-01	Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering	ACL 2019; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, latent-evidence, ict
28	2019-11-01	Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models	ICLR 2020; peer-reviewed	language-modeling, non-parametric-memory

Modern neural retrieval and RAG (2020–2021)

2020

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
29	2020	Accelerating Large-Scale Inference with Anisotropic Vector Quantization	ICML 2020; peer-reviewed	ann, scann, quantization
30	2020	Adaptive Semiparametric Language Models	TACL 2021; peer-reviewed	memory, adaptive-fusion
31	2020	Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval	ICLR 2021; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, ann-negatives, training
32	2020	ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT	SIGIR 2020; peer-reviewed	late-interaction, multi-vector
33	2020	Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps	COLING 2020; peer-reviewed	multi-hop, benchmark, reasoning
34	2020	Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model	Findings EMNLP 2020; peer-reviewed	reranking, t5, generative-ranking
35	2020	DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images	WACV 2021; peer-reviewed	document-ai, visual-qa, benchmark
36	2020	KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks	NAACL 2021; peer-reviewed	benchmark, provenance, wikipedia
37	2020	RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering	NAACL 2021; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, denoising, cross-batch-negatives
38	2020-02-10	REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training	ICML 2020; peer-reviewed	pretraining, latent-retrieval, index-refresh
39	2020-04-10	Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering	EMNLP 2020; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, contrastive-learning, faiss
40	2020-05-22	Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks	NeurIPS 2020; peer-reviewed	rag, latent-documents, seq2seq
41	2020-06-26	Pre-training via Paraphrasing	NeurIPS 2020; peer-reviewed	pretraining, multilingual, retrieval
42	2020-07-02	Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering	EACL 2021; peer-reviewed	fusion-in-decoder, multi-passage
43	2020-12-08	Distilling Knowledge from Reader to Retriever for Question Answering	ICLR 2021; peer-reviewed	distillation, reader-to-retriever

2021

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
44	2021	BEIR: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models	NeurIPS 2021 Datasets and Benchmarks; peer-reviewed	retrieval, benchmark, zero-shot
45	2021	COIL: Revisit Exact Lexical Match in Information Retrieval with Contextualized Inverted List	NAACL 2021; peer-reviewed	learned-sparse, multi-vector, lexical
46	2021	Condenser: a Pre-training Architecture for Dense Retrieval	EMNLP 2021; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, pretraining
47	2021	GPL: Generative Pseudo Labeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Dense Retrieval	NAACL 2022; peer-reviewed	domain-adaptation, synthetic-queries, distillation
48	2021	Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers	EMNLP 2022; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, scaling, zero-shot
49	2021	MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Composition	TACL 2022; peer-reviewed	multi-hop, benchmark, composition
50	2021	SPANN: Highly-efficient Billion-scale Approximate Nearest Neighborhood Search	NeurIPS 2021; peer-reviewed	ann, disk, inverted-file
51	2021	SPLADE: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for First Stage Ranking	SIGIR 2021; peer-reviewed	learned-sparse, expansion
52	2021	Unsupervised Corpus Aware Language Model Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval	ACL 2022; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, pretraining, contrastive
53	2021-04	Efficiently Teaching an Effective Dense Retriever with Balanced Topic Aware Sampling	SIGIR 2021; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, distillation, sampling
54	2021-04	Learning Passage Impacts for Inverted Indexes	CIKM 2021; peer-reviewed	learned-sparse, impact-index
55	2021-06-09	End-to-End Training of Multi-Document Reader and Retriever for Open-Domain Question Answering	NeurIPS 2021; peer-reviewed	joint-training, multi-document
56	2021-09	SPLADE v2: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for Information Retrieval	arXiv; preprint	learned-sparse, expansion
57	2021-12-03	ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction	NAACL 2022; peer-reviewed	late-interaction, compression
58	2021-12-08	Improving Language Models by Retrieving from Trillions of Tokens	ICML 2022; peer-reviewed	pretraining, chunk-retrieval, scaling
59	2021-12-16	Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning	TMLR 2022; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, unsupervised

Generalization, attribution, and retrieval control (2022–2023)

2022

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
60	2022	ASQA: Factoid Questions Meet Long-Form Answers	EMNLP 2022; peer-reviewed	long-form, ambiguous-qa, citations
61	2022	ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning	Findings ACL 2022; peer-reviewed	charts, visual-qa, reasoning
62	2022	FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness	NeurIPS 2022; peer-reviewed	attention, efficiency, serving
63	2022	Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questions	ACL 2023; peer-reviewed	multi-hop, iterative-retrieval, reasoning
64	2022	KG-FiD: Infusing Knowledge Graph in Fusion-in-Decoder for Open-Domain Question Answering	ACL 2022; peer-reviewed	knowledge-graph, fid, multi-hop
65	2022	LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking	ACM Multimedia 2022; peer-reviewed	document-ai, layout, multimodal
66	2022	Matryoshka Representation Learning	NeurIPS 2022; peer-reviewed	embeddings, adaptive-dimension, efficiency
67	2022	Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models	ICLR 2023; peer-reviewed	self-ask, decomposition, search
68	2022	MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark	EACL 2023; peer-reviewed	embeddings, benchmark
69	2022	One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings	Findings ACL 2023; peer-reviewed	embeddings, instructions
70	2022	RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models	ACL 2023; peer-reviewed	verification, revision, attribution
71	2022	RetroMAE: Pre-Training Retrieval-oriented Language Models Via Masked Auto-Encoder	EMNLP 2022; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, pretraining, masked-autoencoder
72	2022	SimLM: Pre-training with Representation Bottleneck for Dense Passage Retrieval	ACL 2023; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, pretraining, bottleneck
73	2022	When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories	ACL 2023; peer-reviewed	long-tail, parametric-memory, benchmark
74	2022-05	PLAID: An Efficient Engine for Late Interaction Retrieval	arXiv; preprint	late-interaction, indexing, efficiency
75	2022-05	QAMPARI: An Open-domain Question Answering Benchmark for Questions with Many Answers from Multiple Paragraphs	arXiv; preprint	list-qa, long-form, benchmark
76	2022-05	SPLADE++: Ensemble Distillation for High Performance Sparse Information Retrieval	arXiv; preprint	learned-sparse, distillation, hard-negatives
77	2022-08-05	Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models	JMLR 2023; peer-reviewed	pretraining, few-shot, distillation
78	2022-10-06	MuRAG: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generator for Open Question Answering over Images and Text	EMNLP 2022; peer-reviewed	multimodal, images, qa
79	2022-10-06	ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models	ICLR 2023; peer-reviewed	agents, tool-use, reasoning
80	2022-11-22	Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Language Modeling	arXiv; preprint	multimodal, generation
81	2022-12	Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training	arXiv; preprint	embeddings, weak-supervision, contrastive
82	2022-12-20	Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labels	ACL 2023; peer-reviewed	query-transformation, hypothetical-document

2023

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
83	2023	AdANNS: A Framework for Adaptive Semantic Search	NeurIPS 2023; peer-reviewed	ann, adaptive-representation, efficiency
84	2023	ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems	NAACL 2024; peer-reviewed	evaluation, prediction-powered-inference
85	2023	CITADEL: Conditional Token Interaction via Dynamic Lexical Routing for Efficient and Effective Multi-Vector Retrieval	ACL 2023; peer-reviewed	multi-vector, lexical-routing, efficiency
86	2023	Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention	SOSP 2023; peer-reviewed	serving, paged-attention, systems
87	2023	Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations	EMNLP 2023; peer-reviewed	citations, attributed-generation, benchmark
88	2023	FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentation	Findings ACL 2024; peer-reviewed	freshness, search, dynamic-qa
89	2023	How to Train Your DRAGON: Diverse Augmentation Towards Generalizable Dense Retrieval	Findings EMNLP 2023; peer-reviewed	dense-retrieval, augmentation, generalization
90	2023	Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents	EMNLP 2023; peer-reviewed	reranking, llm, listwise
91	2023	LLMLingua: Compressing Prompts for Accelerated Inference of Large Language Models	EMNLP 2023; peer-reviewed	prompt-compression, efficiency
92	2023	LongLLMLingua: Accelerating and Enhancing LLMs in Long Context Scenarios via Prompt Compression	ACL 2024; peer-reviewed	prompt-compression, long-context, position-bias
93	2023	RAGAS: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation	EACL 2024 Demo; peer-reviewed	evaluation, faithfulness
94	2023	RAGTruth: A Hallucination Corpus for Developing Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Language Models	ACL 2024; peer-reviewed	hallucination, span-labels
95	2023	RankT5: Fine-Tuning T5 for Text Ranking with Ranking Losses	SIGIR 2023; peer-reviewed	reranking, listwise, ranking-loss
96	2023	Worst-case Performance of Popular Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Implementations: Guarantees and Limitations	NeurIPS 2023; peer-reviewed	ann, robustness, theory
97	2023-03	RepoCoder: Repository-Level Code Completion Through Iterative Retrieval and Generation	EMNLP 2023; peer-reviewed	code, iterative-retrieval, generation
98	2023-03-14	Query2doc: Query Expansion with Large Language Models	arXiv; preprint	query-expansion, pseudo-document
99	2023-04	XTR: Rethinking the Role of Token Retrieval in Multi-Vector Retrieval	arXiv; preprint	multi-vector, token-retrieval, efficiency
100	2023-05-11	Active Retrieval Augmented Generation	EMNLP 2023; peer-reviewed	active-retrieval, uncertainty
101	2023-05-23	Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models	EMNLP 2023; peer-reviewed	query-rewriting, reinforcement-learning
102	2023-05-24	Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Iterative Retrieval-Generation Synergy	arXiv; preprint	iterative-retrieval, generation
103	2023-07-06	Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts	TACL 2024; peer-reviewed	long-context, position, distraction
104	2023-08	LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding	arXiv; preprint	long-context, benchmark, bilingual
105	2023-08-25	Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents	ICLR 2024; peer-reviewed	ocr, scientific-documents, parsing
106	2023-09-04	Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation	AAAI 2024; peer-reviewed	evaluation, noise, counterfactual
107	2023-10	RECOMP: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LMs with Compression and Selective Augmentation	ICLR 2024; peer-reviewed	compression, selective-augmentation
108	2023-10-17	Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection	ICLR 2024; peer-reviewed	adaptive-retrieval, reflection, citations
109	2023-12	Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use?	EMNLP 2024; peer-reviewed	propositions, chunking, granularity

Adaptive, multimodal, secure, and production RAG (2024–2026)

2024

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
110	2024	AgentPoison: Red-Teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases	NeurIPS 2024; peer-reviewed	security, poisoning, backdoor
111	2024	C-RAG: Certified Generation Risks for Retrieval-Augmented Language Models	ICML 2024; peer-reviewed	conformal-risk, certification
112	2024	CRAG: A Comprehensive RAG Benchmark	NeurIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks; peer-reviewed	benchmark, freshness, long-tail
113	2024	Docling Technical Report	arXiv; preprint	document-parsing, layout, tables
114	2024	Don't Forget Private Retrieval: Distributed Private Similarity Search for Large Language Models	Privacy in NLP 2024; peer-reviewed	privacy, mpc, similarity-search
115	2024	Generative Representational Instruction Tuning	ICLR 2025; peer-reviewed	embeddings, generation, efficiency
116	2024	HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models	NeurIPS 2024; peer-reviewed	graph, pagerank, multi-hop
117	2024	Hybrid Text Retrieval with Large Language Models: A Study of Robustness and Generalization	LREC-COLING 2024; peer-reviewed	reranking, hybrid, robustness
118	2024	Introducing Contextual Retrieval	Anthropic Engineering; industry-report	contextual-retrieval, chunking, hybrid
119	2024	LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression	Findings ACL 2024; peer-reviewed	prompt-compression, distillation
120	2024	Long-Context LLMs Meet RAG: Overcoming Challenges for Long Inputs in RAG	ICLR 2025; peer-reviewed	long-context, distraction, top-k
121	2024	LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory	ICLR 2025; peer-reviewed	memory, benchmark, updates
122	2024	MMTEB: Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark	ICLR 2025; peer-reviewed	multilingual, embeddings, benchmark
123	2024	NoMIRACL: Knowing When You Don't Know for Robust Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation	Findings EMNLP 2024; peer-reviewed	multilingual, abstention, hallucination
124	2024	PDF-to-Tree: Parsing PDF Content into a Tree Structure	Findings EMNLP 2024; peer-reviewed	pdf, parsing, hierarchy
125	2024	PoisonedRAG: Knowledge Poisoning Attacks to Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models	USENIX Security 2025; peer-reviewed	security, poisoning
126	2024	RAGBench: Explainable Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems	arXiv; preprint	benchmark, evaluation, trace
127	2024	RAGChecker: A Fine-Grained Framework for Diagnosing Retrieval-Augmented Generation	NeurIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks; peer-reviewed	evaluation, claims, diagnostics
128	2024	RaLMSpec: Accelerating Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Serving with Speculation	ICML 2024; peer-reviewed	systems, latency, speculation
129	2024	RankRAG: Unifying Context Ranking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in LLMs	NeurIPS 2024; peer-reviewed	reranking, instruction-tuning
130	2024	Sufficient Context: A New Lens on Retrieval Augmented Generation Systems	ICLR 2025; peer-reviewed	abstention, context-sufficiency
131	2024	The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation	Findings ACL 2024; peer-reviewed	privacy, extraction, rag
132	2024	TREC Retrieval-Augmented Generation Track	NIST TREC 2024-2026; benchmark-program	benchmark, citations, external-judgments
133	2024-01	MultiHop-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-Hop Queries	arXiv; preprint	multi-hop, rag, benchmark
134	2024-01-29	Corrective Retrieval Augmented Generation	arXiv; preprint	correction, web-search, routing
135	2024-01-30	CRUD-RAG: A Comprehensive Chinese Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation	ACM TOIS; peer-reviewed	evaluation, crud, chinese
136	2024-01-31	RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval	ICLR 2024; peer-reviewed	hierarchical-retrieval, summaries
137	2024-03	MedRAG: Enhancing Large Language Models in Medicine with Retrieval-Augmented Generation	arXiv; preprint	medical, rag, domain
138	2024-03	RAFT: Adapting Language Model to Domain Specific RAG	arXiv; preprint	domain-adaptation, fine-tuning, rag
139	2024-03	Repoformer: Selective Retrieval for Repository-Level Code Completion	ICML 2024; peer-reviewed	code, selective-retrieval, generation
140	2024-03-21	Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity	NAACL 2024; peer-reviewed	routing, complexity, efficiency
141	2024-04-24	From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization	Microsoft Research; industry-report	graph, global-synthesis, communities
142	2024-06-27	ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models	ICLR 2025; peer-reviewed	visual-retrieval, late-interaction, documents
143	2024-07	BRIGHT: A Realistic and Challenging Benchmark for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval	ICLR 2025; peer-reviewed	benchmark, reasoning-retrieval
144	2024-07-23	Retrieval Augmented Generation or Long-Context LLMs? A Comprehensive Study and Hybrid Approach	EMNLP Industry 2024; peer-reviewed	long-context, routing, self-route
145	2024-09	Late Chunking: Contextual Chunk Embeddings Using Long-Context Embedding Models	arXiv; preprint	chunking, contextual-embeddings
146	2024-10-14	VisRAG: Vision-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Multi-modality Documents	ICLR 2025; peer-reviewed	visual-rag, documents, generation

2025

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
147	2025	Auditing Prompt Caching in Language Model APIs	ICML 2025; peer-reviewed	caching, privacy, side-channel
148	2025	Beyond Text: Unveiling Privacy Vulnerabilities in Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation	EMNLP 2025; peer-reviewed	privacy, multimodal, extraction
149	2025	ComRAG: A Conversational Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework with Dynamic Memory Consolidation	ACL Industry 2025; peer-reviewed	memory, consolidation, latency
150	2025	DeepRAG: Thinking to Retrieval Step by Step for Large Language Models	ICLR 2026; peer-reviewed	retrieval-policy, mdp, reasoning
151	2025	DioR: Adaptive Cognitive Detection and Contextual Retrieval Optimization for Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation	ACL 2025; peer-reviewed	dynamic-rag, retrieval-trigger, context-selection
152	2025	From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Models	ICML 2025; peer-reviewed	graph, memory, multi-hop
153	2025	Frustratingly Simple Retrieval Improves Challenging, Reasoning-Intensive Benchmarks	ICLR 2026; peer-reviewed	datastore, systems, reasoning
154	2025	GaRAGe: A Benchmark for Grounded and Reliable RAG Evaluation	Findings ACL 2025; peer-reviewed	grounding, deflection, citations
155	2025	HiPRAG: Hierarchical Process Rewards for Retrieval-Augmented Generation	ICLR 2026; peer-reviewed	process-reward, search-efficiency
156	2025	How Does Knowledge Selection Help Retrieval Augmented Generation?	Findings EMNLP 2025; peer-reviewed	selection, reranking, generation
157	2025	Knowledgeable-R1: Learning to Know When to Search and Trust External Knowledge	ICLR 2026; peer-reviewed	conflict, parametric-knowledge, reinforcement-learning
158	2025	Learning Contextual Retrieval for Robust Conversational Search	EMNLP 2025; peer-reviewed	conversation, contextual-retrieval, embeddings
159	2025	Learning Distraction-Aware Retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation	ICLR 2026; peer-reviewed	distraction, evidence-utility, long-context
160	2025	M+: Extending MemoryLLM with Scalable Long-Term Memory	ICML 2025; peer-reviewed	latent-memory, retrieval
161	2025	M3DocVQA: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Multi-Document Question Answering	ICCV 2025 Workshop; peer-reviewed	multimodal, multi-document, benchmark
162	2025	MoLoRAG: Bootstrapping VLM-Based Retrieval with a Multi-Modal Document Graph	EMNLP 2025; peer-reviewed	visual-rag, graph, documents
163	2025	mt RAG: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems	TACL 2025; peer-reviewed	multi-turn, benchmark
164	2025	PropRAG: Guiding Retrieval with Beam Search over Proposition Paths	EMNLP 2025; peer-reviewed	propositions, beam-search, multi-hop
165	2025	Q-RAG: Learning to Select Evidence with Value-Based Reinforcement Learning	ICLR 2026 Oral; peer-reviewed	retrieval-policy, value-learning, long-context
166	2025	RAG LLMs Are Not Safer: A Safety Analysis of Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models	NAACL 2025; peer-reviewed	safety, robustness
167	2025	REAL-MM-RAG: A Real-World Multi-Modal Retrieval Augmented Generation Benchmark	ACL 2025; peer-reviewed	multimodal, benchmark
168	2025	ReasonIR: Training Retrievers for Reasoning Tasks	COLM 2025; peer-reviewed	reasoning-retrieval, hard-negatives
169	2025	RemoteRAG: A Privacy-Preserving LLM Cloud RAG Service	Findings ACL 2025; peer-reviewed	privacy, differential-privacy, cloud
170	2025	ReSearch: Learning to Reason with Search for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning	NeurIPS 2025; peer-reviewed	agentic-rag, grpo
171	2025	Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning with Query-Specific Knowledge Graphs	ICLR 2026; peer-reviewed	dynamic-graph, reasoning
172	2025	RMM: Reinforced Memory Management for Long-Term Conversational Agents	ACL 2025; peer-reviewed	memory, conversation, reinforcement-learning
173	2025	SafeRAG: Benchmarking Security in Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Model	ACL 2025; peer-reviewed	security, benchmark, conflict
174	2025	Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning	COLM 2025; peer-reviewed	agentic-rag, reinforcement-learning, search
175	2025	SeCon-RAG: A Security-Conscious Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework	NeurIPS 2025; peer-reviewed	security, filtering, conflict
176	2025	Shifting from Ranking to Set Selection for Retrieval Augmented Generation	ACL 2025; peer-reviewed	set-selection, multi-hop, reranking
177	2025	StepSearch: Igniting LLMs Search Ability via Step-Wise Proximal Policy Optimization	EMNLP 2025; peer-reviewed	agentic-rag, process-reward
178	2025	Stronger Baselines for Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Long-Context Language Models	EMNLP 2025; peer-reviewed	long-context, rag, baselines
179	2025	syftr: Pareto-Optimal Generative AI	AutoML / PMLR 2025; peer-reviewed	automl, pareto, cost
180	2025	TableRAG: A Retrieval Augmented Generation Framework for Heterogeneous Document Reasoning	EMNLP 2025; peer-reviewed	tables, sql, heterogeneous-documents
181	2025	Think&Cite: Improving Attributed Text Generation with Self-Guided MCTS	ACL 2025; peer-reviewed	citations, mcts, attribution
182	2025	Visual Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Dynamic Token Compression	CVPR 2025; peer-reviewed	visual-rag, compression
183	2025	When to Use Graphs in Retrieval-Augmented Generation	ICLR 2026; peer-reviewed	graph, benchmark, component-analysis

2026

#	First public	Work	Venue/status	Topics
184	2026	CODEPROMPTZIP: Code-specific Prompt Compression for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Coding Tasks with LMs	Findings ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	code, prompt-compression, rag
185	2026	Dissecting GraphRAG: A Modular Analysis of Knowledge Structuring for Factoid Question Answering	TACL 2026; peer-reviewed	graph-rag, ablation, evaluation
186	2026	Exposing Privacy Risks in Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation	Findings ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	privacy, graph-rag, extraction
187	2026	HiChunk: Evaluating and Enhancing Retrieval Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Chunking	ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	chunking, hierarchical, evaluation
188	2026	MegaRAG: Multimodal Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation	ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	multimodal, graph
189	2026	NEST: Nested Evidence Survival for Retrieval	ACL Industry 2026; peer-reviewed	evidence-selection, noise, retrieval
190	2026	Overcoming the Retrieval Barrier: Indirect Prompt Injection in the Wild for LLM Systems	USENIX Security 2026; peer-reviewed	security, prompt-injection, retrieval
191	2026	PRA-RAG: Provably Robust Aggregation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation	Findings ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	security, provable-robustness, poisoning
192	2026	PROGRAM: Programmatic Retrieval Optimization with Generative Reasoning and Augmented Multi-queries	Findings ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	programmatic-retrieval, multi-hop
193	2026	R3AG: Retriever Routing for Retrieval-Augmented Generation	ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	routing, retrievers, rag
194	2026	RAG over Tables: Hierarchical Memory Index, Multi-Stage Retrieval, and Benchmarking	Findings ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	tables, hierarchical-index, graph
195	2026	Region-R1: Reinforcing Query-Side Region Cropping for Multi-Modal Re-Ranking	Findings ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	multimodal, reranking, reinforcement-learning
196	2026	Retrieval as Generation: A Unified Framework with Self-Triggered Information Planning	ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	retrieval-control, generation, reinforcement-learning
197	2026	RobustVisRAG: Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Real-World Visual Document Understanding	CVPR 2026; peer-reviewed	visual-rag, robustness, distortion
198	2026	RouteRAG: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Text and Graph via Reinforcement Learning	Findings ACL 2026; peer-reviewed	routing, graph, reinforcement-learning
199	2026	SCAN: Semantic Document Layout Analysis for Textual and Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation	Findings EACL 2026; peer-reviewed	layout, visual-rag, document-parsing
200	2026	SemEval-2026 Task 8: MTRAGEval - Evaluating Multi-Turn Retrieval-Augmented Generation	SemEval 2026; peer-reviewed	multi-turn, benchmark, retrieval
201	2026	T2-RAGBench: Text-and-Table Benchmark for Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation	EACL 2026; peer-reviewed	tables, benchmark, numerical-reasoning
202	2026	Tackling Distractor Documents in Multi-Hop QA with Reinforcement and Curriculum Learning	Findings EACL 2026; peer-reviewed	citations, curriculum, distractors
203	2026	When Good OCR Is Not Enough: Benchmarking OCR Robustness for Retrieval-Augmented Generation	ACL Industry 2026; peer-reviewed	ocr, benchmark, document-rag

Coverage and maintenance rules

The index is broad by design, but it is not a claim that every publication ever using retrieval appears here. A work enters the registry when it is needed to support a historical, mechanism, empirical, evaluation, security, or systems claim in this repository. The coverage matrix shows which lifecycle surface each body of work supports.

When adding a source:

1. prefer final official proceedings, then accepted-paper/author manuscript, then an original preprint or first-party report;
2. record earliest public date separately from venue year;
3. use a unique stable ID and primary URL;
4. label status without upgrading preprints or industry reports;
5. attach specific topic tags and update the substantive chapter;
6. regenerate this file and the complete handbook notebook; and
7. run the full validator so dates, links, notebook execution, and coverage remain synchronized.