Adaptive-RAG

https://github.com/starsuzi/Adaptive-RAG

Smaller classifier LM predicts query complexity, then routes to no-retrieval / single-step / iterative retrieval as appropriate. NAACL 2024.

At a glance

Type
Query-complexity routing
Tier
T3
Created
2024-04
Latest release
no releases
License
Apache-2.0
Pricing
searched not found
Funding
not applicable — not commercial

Taxonomy

storage
vector
retrieval
similarity
persistence
long-term
update
read-only
unit
chunk
governance
inspectable
conflict
n/a

When to use

Optimised for: retrieval quality / accuracy on long-context QA

Anti-fit: most are research papers; production fitness varies by maintainer

Pros & cons

Pros

Query-adaptive routing across retrieval strategies — picks the right method per question.

Cons

Routing decisions can be wrong; adds inference cost.

Claims & capabilities

Improves overall efficiency and accuracy of QA systems vs adaptive baselines, across query complexity levels.

Technical surface

API surface
not applicable — research paper
Backend storage
not applicable — research paper
Deployment
searched not found
Embedding model
not applicable — research paper
Multi-tenancy
not applicable — research paper
MCP
not applicable — research paper, no deployed product
A2A
not applicable — research paper, no deployed product
OpenTelemetry
not applicable — research paper, no deployed product

Similar systems

Other retrieval-as-memory hybrids in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.

  • GraphRAG (Microsoft) T1

    Modular graph-based RAG. Leiden community detection over knowledge graph; community summaries at multiple levels. DRIFT Search hybrid (Oct 2024).

  • RETRO T3

    DeepMind. Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer with chunked cross-attention over a 2T-token retrieval database. Frozen BERT retriever + differentiable encoder.

  • Atlas T3

    Meta AI. Jointly fine-tunes retriever + LM for few-shot tasks.

  • RAPTOR T3

    Stanford recursive-summarisation tree over the corpus — clusters and summarises documents into a hierarchical index; retrieves at multiple levels. ICLR 2024.

  • Self-RAG T4

    Trains an LLM end-to-end to emit reflection tokens that decide whether to retrieve, assess passage relevance, and critique output quality — all within a single model.

  • HippoRAG / HippoRAG2 T3

    Hippocampus-inspired RAG. LLMs + knowledge graphs + Personalized PageRank to mimic neocortex/hippocampus roles. NeurIPS 2024.

Related systems

References (1)

  • Self-RAG cites — S2 isInfluential citation

Row last verified 2026-05-14. Catalog data is CC-BY-4.0 — see how to read this.