SQuAI: Scientific Question-Answering with Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
We present SQuAI (https://squai.scads.ai/), a scalable and trustworthy multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for scientific question answering (QA) with large language models (LLMs). SQuAI addresses key limitations of existing RAG systems in the scholarly domain, where complex, open-domain questions demand accurate answers, explicit claims with citations, and retrieval across millions of scientific documents. Built on over 2.3 million full-text papers from arXiv.org, SQuAI employs four collaborative agents to decompose complex questions into sub-questions, retrieve targeted evidence via hybrid sparse-dense retrieval, and adaptively filter documents to improve contextual relevance. To ensure faithfulness and traceability, SQuAI integrates in-line citations for each generated claim and provides supporting sentences from the source documents. Our system improves faithfulness, answer relevance, and contextual relevance by up to +0.088 (12%) over a strong RAG baseline. We further release a benchmark of 1,000 scientific question-answer-evidence triplets to support reproducibility. With transparent reasoning, verifiable citations, and domain-wide scalability, SQuAI demonstrates how multi-agent RAG enables more trustworthy scientific QA with LLMs.
Details
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM ’25) |
| Pages | 6603 - 6608 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| ISBN (electronic) | 979-8-4007-2040-6 |
| Publication status | Published - 10 Nov 2025 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
External IDs
| Scopus | 105023185350 |
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