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Jul 5, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Predicting Weak Retrieval Without an LLM: Low‑Cost Signals and Gateways

Most retrieval systems apply the same pipeline to every query, but this one‑size‑fits‑all approach fails on hard queries and wastes compute on easy ones; the article defines cheap, no‑LLM signals to predict weak retrieval, evaluates them across three corpora, and proposes a gating method to upgrade only the weak cases.