Picking Less to Know More: When RAG Stops Ranking and Starts Thinking
Opening — Why this matters now Retrieval-Augmented Generation has a dirty secret: it keeps retrieving more context while quietly getting no smarter. As context windows balloon to 100K tokens and beyond, RAG systems dutifully shovel in passages—Top‑5, Top‑10, Top‑100—hoping recall will eventually rescue accuracy. It doesn’t. Accuracy plateaus. Costs rise. Attention diffuses. The model gets lost in its own evidence pile. ...