Query decomposition doesn’t fix context starvation — it just moves it

The New Stack · 2 weeks ago · 17

A study of query decomposition in RAG systems found that splitting a multi-intent question into sub-queries retrieves the right passages but still leaves most sub-intents excluded from the final 2,000-token packed context. In a production-default pipeline, 31.1% of sub-intents were starved even after their evidence was retrieved. The fix changes from improving retrieval to changing allocation/packing policy (with example results rising from 68.9% to 89.4% coverage when allocation is adjusted).