Advanced RAG: Route Questions Before Adding More Retrieval Stages

Advanced RAG pipelines should begin with a baseline system and add targeted retrieval components only after identifying specific query failures, such as missed exact identifiers, paraphrased content, buried sources, missing relationships, or absent contextual conditions. Query rewriting must retain critical details such as names, dates, account scope, and permissions, while preserving the original question for traceability and comparing retrieval results before and after rewriting. Potential interventions—including lexical search, semantic retrieval, reranking, relationship traversal, and parent-section expansion—should be treated as testable hypotheses rather than mandatory stages, with limits on candidates, depth, model calls, latency, and fallback behavior. Evaluation should compare each change against labeled baseline questions by query class, measuring evidence coverage, answer support, latency, and token use while avoiding duplicate or outdated evidence from disproportionately influencing results. Before launch, teams should review evidence quality, access controls, degraded behavior, and managed retrieval options, retaining only complexity that demonstrably improves performance.

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