{"paper":{"title":"Does Faithfulness-Guided Alignment Hurt Accuracy? Unlocking Accurate and Faithful Post-Retrieval Reasoning","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Cong Cao, Diandian Guo, Fangfang Yuan, Jin B. Hong, Qiang Sun, Wenxiao Zhang, Yanbing Liu, Yu Liu, Zhiyuan Ma","submitted_at":"2026-02-01T17:33:39Z","abstract_excerpt":"Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can achieve strong answer accuracy on multi-hop questions, but outcome-level rewards often leave reasoning traces weakly grounded and difficult to audit. Under noisy retrieval, models may exhibit right-answer-wrong-reason failures, where the final answer is correct but the supporting rationale exploits shortcuts or unsupported evidence. We therefore ask whether faithfulness-guided alignment hurts answer accuracy in post-retrieval reasoning. To study this question, we propose CRAFT (Calibrated Reasoning with Answer-Faithful Traces), a reinforcement learning "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2602.01348","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2602.01348/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}