Work

PonsRAG: A Pons-Inspired RAG Bridging Cognitive Islands for Coordinated Long Narrative Reasoning

Year: 2026

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Long Narrative Reasoning is an essential capability for processing and reasoning over complex narratives.While retrieval-augmented generation provides a promising framework, existing methods still face two critical challenges: cognitive islanding and cross-layer evidence disconnection.To address these issues, we propose PonsRAG, a coordinated RAG framework inspired by the biological pons.PonsRAG consists of two key components: Triple-Layer Indexing, which organizes documents into a connected knowledge structure to bridge cognitive islands, and Coordinated Reasoning, which retrieves evidence across distinct layers and integrates cross-layer information into a unified context.We evaluate PonsRAG on four longcontext narrative benchmarks, and experimental results show that it outperforms the strongest baseline, achieving a 11.56% relative improvement in average accuracy on multi-choice tasks.

Source: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

DOI: 10.18653/2026.emnlp-main.2299