Re-ranking and Late Interaction Drive Retrieval Quality: A Controlled Comparison of RAG Strategies for Scientific Question Answering

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.38473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is now the standard way to ground Large Language Models (LLMs) in external knowledge, yet the design space of retrieval pipelines is large and the trade-offs between variants are not well understood, especially on domain-specific corpora at realistic scale. In this work, we present a controlled comparison of six retrieval strategies for scientific question answering: (i) classic top-k dense retrieval, (ii) LLM