Florin Cuconasu

Irrelevant passages retrieved in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) distract LLMs, leading to incorrect answers. This paper defines and quantifies this "distracting effect." It proposes novel methods to identify and use hard distracting passages to train more robust LLMs.…

The Distracting Effect: Understanding Irrelevant Passages in RAG Introduces a quantifiable measure of how irrelevant passages distract LLMs in RAG, with methods for identifying hard distracting passages to improve performance through fine-tuning. 📝arxiv.org/abs/2505.06914

📣 📣 The #sigir2025 LiveRAG Challenge is open at: sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/live-rag-chall… Prizes: - First Prize: $5000 - Second Prize: $3000 - Third Prize: $2000 Deadlines: - Application submission deadline: February 24, 2025 More info? Ask [email protected].

🚀Huge congratulations to Florin! 🏆 If reading the research paper isn't your thing, no worries—you can listen to the generated podcast instead, and it's actually pretty good. Quoting from it, "It's going to sound crazy! shorturl.at/NlVGc

Honored to be recognized with the Best Poster Award at #M2LSummerSchool! Huge thanks to the organizers and to everyone I engaged with during the poster discussions for all the great ideas. Grateful to share our work, 'The Power Of Noise' dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/36… #RAG #PhD

Yesterday @FlorinCuconasu presented “The Power of Noise: Redefining Retrieval for RAG Systems” at the @M2lSchool Summer School . Lot of people involved with different backgrounds . This work was presented as a conference paper at @SIGIRConf 2024. Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/36…