When More Documents Hurt RAG: Mitigating Vector Search Dilution with Domain-Scoped, Model-Agnostic Retrieval

arXiv:2606.11350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation degrades when scaled to large, heterogeneous document collections, where dense similarity loses discriminative power, and top-k retrieval increasingly returns semantically similar but contextually incorrect chunks. We refer to this failure mode as vector search dilution. Even when using hybrid dense+sparse retrieval, we observed this firsthand in a deployed Wyoming Department of Transportation corpus, where scaling from 54 to 1,128 documents (88,907 chunks) reduced accuracy from 75% to below 40%. To address this dil

Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.

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