Retriever-Free Retrieval: Navigating Documents with Decision Models

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Article Summary

While language models have become dramatically more capable, retrieval still largely relies on lexical matching or similarity in fixed embedding spaces. This creates a capability asymmetry: what the retriever fails to find, even the strongest generator cannot recover. We propose DecisionRAG, which brings the capabilities of pretrained language models to retrieval using decision models that jointly evaluate candidate branches in a single forward pass, without generating any tokens, and show that judging candidates in a shared context makes their relevance estimates comparable. Like a person browsing a library, DecisionRAG navigates the corpus's inherent structure from broad topics down to individual passages, deciding at each level which branches are worth exploring. Without task-specific training or a first-stage retriever, DecisionRAG outperforms dense retrieval with an 8B reranker by 13.8 R@1 points on MultiDoc2Dial and 17.4 Hit@1 points on Natural Questions. Across four benchmarks, including a corpus of 2.68 million Wikipedia paragraphs, retrieval takes just 0.7-1.8 seconds per query.

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