AGENTIC-SYSTEMSJuly 21, 20261 min read

Shapley Context Pruning: A Cooperative Game Perspective for Context Reranking and Pruning

Researchers introduce Shapley Context Pruning (SCP), a unified framework applying cooperative game theory to optimize context reranking and pruning in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

Title:Shapley Context Pruning: A Cooperative Game Perspective for Context Reranking and Pruning

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Context reranking and pruning have become essential for improving the efficiency of modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, yet an interpretable and unified framework remains underexplored. Previous work has primarily emphasized lexical retrieval, cross-encoder architectures, model distillation, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), mostly relying on heuristic loss functions and empirical attribution. This paper presents Shapley Context Pruning (SCP), a novel framework for context reranking that establishes a cooperative-game-theory perspective for importance attribution by modeling the context as a cooperative game. Balancing the trade-off between fine-grained and coarse-grained representations, we employ a Deep Sets architecture to approximate a permutation-invariant value function at the sentence level, utilizing pre-trained language models as sentence embedders and optimizing via a pairwise margin ranking loss. To ensure practical scalability without sacrificing mathematical rigor, we leverage Monte-Carlo sampling for efficient training and inference, providing formal theoretical error bounds and sample complexity guarantees for preserving Top-K subset rankings. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive experiments-spanning supporting-sentence recall, Needle-in-the-Haystack (NIAH) evaluations, long-context QA, and multi-hop reasoning-alongside rigorous ablation studies on embedding quality and attribution strategies. The model achieves competitive downstream QA performance against robust baselines.

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Source: arXiv cs.AI Recent

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