DeFT-RAG: Decomposing Multi-Hop Questions into Self-Contained Sub-Questions with Reusable Answers

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) lets a large language model (LLM) answer questions by retrieving relevant passages from a large corpus. However, RAG struggles with multi-hop questions, which require chaining facts spread across several documents through intermediate entities that the question never mentions. Graph-based RAG methods retrieve once from the entities a question names and so rarely recover the full evidence chain. Iterative RAG methods recover it step by step, but their accuracy is limited by the many tasks they ask the LLM to perform, such as planning the sub-questions, deciding their dependencies, rewriting them as answers arrive, and keeping track of what is known. We propose DeFT-RAG, a RAG framework built on three components. First, DeFT-RAG generates one self-contained sub-question at a time from the original question and the sub-questions answered so far with their answers (QA pairs). Each sub-question names every entity it asks about, which removes the need to plan, track dependencies or rewrite, and lets the LLM focus on a single fine-grained task at a time. Second, DeFT-RAG moves the remaining LLM work outside the LLM: rule-based updates to a QA table that keeps track of what is known, and yes/no decisions made by a fine-tuned lightweight decision model. Third, DeFT-RAG caches the QA pairs and reuses an answer when a later question asks a sub-question with the same meaning. On MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA and HotpotQA, DeFT-RAG achieves the best accuracy among thirteen baselines with both gpt-4o-mini and Qwen3.6 as the backbone, while giving the LLM fewer input tokens than any other iterative method. With a QA cache shared across 1,000 MuSiQue questions, 23.1% of sub-questions are answered from the cache, which reduces LLM calls by 12.9% without lowering accuracy.