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Search When It Hurts: How UR² Teaches Models to Retrieve Only When Needed

TL;DR for operators UR² is a useful paper because it attacks the part of RAG that most demos politely ignore: search can make a model worse when it is used badly.1 The framework trains smaller language models to coordinate retrieval and reasoning, rather than bolting a search box onto a chatbot and hoping the context window will behave itself. Hope, regrettably, is not a retrieval strategy. ...

August 11, 2025 · 19 min · Zelina