International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer and Communication Engineering

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TITLE A Survey of Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Heterogeneous, Multi-Source Knowledgebases
ABSTRACT Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves a language model’s output by conditioning it on passages retrieved from an external corpus, but most of this work assumes a single, roughly homogeneous document collection. Practical knowledgebases violate that assumption: websites, PDFs, video transcripts, and code repositories are extracted, chunked, cited, and queried in different ways, and one query may need to draw on several at once. This survey organizes the techniques required for grounded question answering over such heterogeneous, multi-source knowledgebases: dense retrieval and RAG foundations, hybrid lexical-dense reranking, chunking strategies for long and structured documents, modality-specific retrieval for web, video, and code, multi-document fusion, and confidence estimation with abstention. Rather than treating each technique in isolation, we examine how each is affected once a corpus is assembled from structurally different sources at query time. One system, SAGE, which ingests and answers questions over crawled websites, PDFs, video transcripts, and GitHub repositories through a shared pipeline, appears as a brief case study showing how the surveyed ideas instantiate in a working implementation. We close with open problems in cross-modal fusion, confidence calibration, incremental re-indexing, and evaluation that remain unresolved across the literature.
AUTHOR SRUJAN ZANJAL, RIMANSHU SONULE, PRATIK BHOYAR, TANISHA SHINGNE, PROF. AYAZ KHAN B.Tech Student, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, St. Vincent Pallotti College of Engineering and Technology, Nagpur, Maharashtra, India Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, St. Vincent Pallotti College of Engineering and Technology, Nagpur, Maharashtra, India
VOLUME 188
DOI DOI: 10.15680/IJIRCCE.2026.1409017
PDF pdf/17_A Survey of Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Heterogeneous, Multi-Source Knowledgebases.pdf
KEYWORDS
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