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Autores principales: Chakraborty, Debashish, Yang, Eugene, Khashabi, Daniel, Lawrie, Dawn, Duh, Kevin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17908
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author Chakraborty, Debashish
Yang, Eugene
Khashabi, Daniel
Lawrie, Dawn
Duh, Kevin
author_facet Chakraborty, Debashish
Yang, Eugene
Khashabi, Daniel
Lawrie, Dawn
Duh, Kevin
contents Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances factual grounding in large language models (LLMs) by incorporating retrieved evidence, but LLM accuracy declines when long or noisy contexts exceed the model's effective attention span. Existing pre-generation filters rely on heuristics or uncalibrated LLM confidence scores, offering no statistical control over retained evidence. We evaluate and demonstrate context engineering through conformal prediction, a coverage-controlled filtering framework that removes irrelevant content while preserving recall of supporting evidence. Using both embedding- and LLM-based scoring functions, we test this approach on the NeuCLIR and RAGTIME collections. Conformal filtering consistently meets its target coverage, ensuring that a specified fraction of relevant snippets are retained, and reduces retained context by 2-3x relative to unfiltered retrieval. On NeuCLIR, downstream factual accuracy measured by ARGUE F1 improves under strict filtering and remains stable at moderate coverage, indicating that most discarded material is redundant or irrelevant. These results demonstrate that conformal prediction enables reliable, coverage-controlled context reduction in RAG, offering a model-agnostic and principled approach to context engineering.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17908
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Principled Context Engineering for RAG: Statistical Guarantees via Conformal Prediction
Chakraborty, Debashish
Yang, Eugene
Khashabi, Daniel
Lawrie, Dawn
Duh, Kevin
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances factual grounding in large language models (LLMs) by incorporating retrieved evidence, but LLM accuracy declines when long or noisy contexts exceed the model's effective attention span. Existing pre-generation filters rely on heuristics or uncalibrated LLM confidence scores, offering no statistical control over retained evidence. We evaluate and demonstrate context engineering through conformal prediction, a coverage-controlled filtering framework that removes irrelevant content while preserving recall of supporting evidence. Using both embedding- and LLM-based scoring functions, we test this approach on the NeuCLIR and RAGTIME collections. Conformal filtering consistently meets its target coverage, ensuring that a specified fraction of relevant snippets are retained, and reduces retained context by 2-3x relative to unfiltered retrieval. On NeuCLIR, downstream factual accuracy measured by ARGUE F1 improves under strict filtering and remains stable at moderate coverage, indicating that most discarded material is redundant or irrelevant. These results demonstrate that conformal prediction enables reliable, coverage-controlled context reduction in RAG, offering a model-agnostic and principled approach to context engineering.
title Principled Context Engineering for RAG: Statistical Guarantees via Conformal Prediction
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17908