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Sustainable Hybrid Document-Routed Retrieval for Financial RAG: Resolving the Robustness-Precision Trade-off

Zhiyuan Cheng, Longying Lai, Yue Liu · Mar 26, 2026 · Citations: 0

How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for financial document QA typically follow a chunk-based paradigm: documents are split into fragments, embedded, and retrieved by similarity. In structurally homogeneous corpora such as regulatory filings, this suffers from cross-document chunk confusion. Semantic File Routing (SFR), which uses LLM structured output to route queries to whole documents, reduces catastrophic failures but sacrifices targeted-chunk precision. We identify this robustness-precision trade-off on the FinDER benchmark (1,500 queries across five groups): SFR achieves higher average scores (6.45 vs. 6.02) and fewer failures (10.3% vs. 22.5%), while chunk-based retrieval (CBR) yields more perfect answers (13.8% vs. 8.5%). To resolve it, we propose Hybrid Document-Routed Retrieval (HDRR), a two-stage architecture that uses SFR as a document filter followed by chunk retrieval scoped to the identified document(s), eliminating cross-document confusion while preserving chunk precision. HDRR achieves the best performance on every metric: an average score of 7.54 (25.2% above CBR, 16.9% above SFR), a 6.4% failure rate, 67.7% correctness (+18.7 pp over CBR), and a 20.1% perfect-answer rate (+6.3 pp over CBR, +11.6 pp over SFR), simultaneously attaining the lowest failure rate and highest precision across all five groups. Beyond accuracy, HDRR is also the most efficient of the high-quality systems: it preserves CBR's compact per-query token budget (~5K-15K, an order of magnitude below SFR's ~50K-200K), incurs no indexing-time LLM spend (versus the one-time ~$100 cost of contextual indexing), and uses fewer per-query LLM calls than self-correcting agentic baselines, translating directly to lower API spend and inference-time energy at deployment scale.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 35%

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for financial document QA typically follow a chunk-based paradigm: documents are split into fragments, embedded, and retrieved by similarity."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for financial document QA typically follow a chunk-based paradigm: documents are split into fragments, embedded, and retrieved by similarity."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for financial document QA typically follow a chunk-based paradigm: documents are split into fragments, embedded, and retrieved by similarity."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for financial document QA typically follow a chunk-based paradigm: documents are split into fragments, embedded, and retrieved by similarity."

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy, Precision

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Semantic File Routing (SFR), which uses LLM structured output to route queries to whole documents, reduces catastrophic failures but sacrifices targeted-chunk precision."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

accuracyprecision

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for financial document QA typically follow a chunk-based paradigm: documents are split into fragments, embedded, and retrieved by similarity.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for financial document QA typically follow a chunk-based paradigm: documents are split into fragments, embedded, and retrieved by similarity.
  • In structurally homogeneous corpora such as regulatory filings, this suffers from cross-document chunk confusion.
  • Semantic File Routing (SFR), which uses LLM structured output to route queries to whole documents, reduces catastrophic failures but sacrifices targeted-chunk precision.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics, Tool-use evaluation) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • We identify this robustness-precision trade-off on the FinDER benchmark (1,500 queries across five groups): SFR achieves higher average scores (6.45 vs.
  • To resolve it, we propose Hybrid Document-Routed Retrieval (HDRR), a two-stage architecture that uses SFR as a document filter followed by chunk retrieval scoped to the identified document(s), eliminating cross-document confusion while…
  • Beyond accuracy, HDRR is also the most efficient of the high-quality systems: it preserves CBR's compact per-query token budget (~5K-15K, an order of magnitude below SFR's ~50K-200K), incurs no indexing-time LLM spend (versus the one-time…

Why It Matters For Eval

  • We identify this robustness-precision trade-off on the FinDER benchmark (1,500 queries across five groups): SFR achieves higher average scores (6.45 vs.
  • Beyond accuracy, HDRR is also the most efficient of the high-quality systems: it preserves CBR's compact per-query token budget (~5K-15K, an order of magnitude below SFR's ~50K-200K), incurs no indexing-time LLM spend (versus the one-time…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy, precision

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