Influence Guided Context Selection for Effective Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses large language model (LLM) hallucinations by grounding responses in external knowledge, but its effectiveness is compromised by poor-quality retrieved contexts containing irrelevant or noisy information. While existing approaches attempt to improve performance through context selection based on predefined context quality assessment metrics, they show limited gains over standard RAG. We attribute this limitation to their failure in holistically utilizing available information (query, context list, and generator) for comprehensive quality assessment. Inspired by recent advances in data selection, we reconceptualize context quality assessment as an inference-time data valuation problem and introduce the Contextual Influence Value (CI value).