CounterRefine: Answer-Conditioned Counterevidence Retrieval for Inference-Time Knowledge Repair in Factual Question Answering

Abstract

In factual question answering, many errors are not failures of access but failures of commitment: the system retrieves relevant evidence, yet still settles on the wrong answer. We present CounterRefine, a lightweight repair layer for short-form RAG that treats the first answer as a hypothesis to test. Given a draft, CounterRefine issues answer-conditioned expansion queries to retrieve candidate-specific evidence, then applies a constrained KEEP or REVISE refinement step whose proposed revisions are accepted only after deterministic validation. The design is intentionally narrow: it adds one evidence-gathering pass and one guarded refinement call rather than replacing the retriever or building a broad agentic system. On the full SimpleQA benchmark, CounterRefine improves a matched one-pass RAG baseline by up to 5.8 correct-rate points; in the full Claude trace, it changes only 5.6% of outputs, with 180 beneficial outcome changes and 8 harmful ones. These findings suggest a simple but important direction for knowledgeable foundation models: beyond accessing evidence, they should also be able to use that evidence to reconsider and, when necessary, repair their own answers.