@inproceedings{kumar-etal-2026-rag,
title = "{RAG} Components Are Not Independently Rankable",
author = "Kumar, Vishnu Prasad Vijaya and
Neverov, Iaroslav and
Chizhov, Pavel and
Changalidis, Anton and
Kazanaviciute, Vaiva and
Langlais, Pierre-Carl and
Stasenko, Anastasia and
Yamshchikov, Ivan P.",
editor = "T.Y.S.S., Santosh and
Agarwal, Amit and
Gupta, Vivek and
Kementchedjhieva, Yova and
Garimella, Aparna and
Hou, Yufang",
booktitle = "The Proceedings of Workshop on Document Intelligence and Understanding",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.docinsights-1.22/",
pages = "303--323",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-477-4",
abstract = "RAG systems are usually compared as complete pipelines, making it difficult to attribute improvements to individual components. We evaluate chunking, retrieval, fusion, and reranking through a full factorial design with paired component substitutions and equal context budgets. Across five benchmarks, chunking interacts with retrieval architecture, BM25 fusion changes direction by domain, and reranking is the only intervention we test that remains beneficial across nearly all upstream configurations. Claim-level transitions further show that similar net recall can conceal very different changes in visible evidence. These findings demonstrate that RAG components cannot be ranked independently and motivate interaction-aware evaluation instead of winner-take-all pipeline comparisons."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T RAG Components Are Not Independently Rankable
%A Kumar, Vishnu Prasad Vijaya
%A Neverov, Iaroslav
%A Chizhov, Pavel
%A Changalidis, Anton
%A Kazanaviciute, Vaiva
%A Langlais, Pierre-Carl
%A Stasenko, Anastasia
%A Yamshchikov, Ivan P.
%Y T.Y.S.S., Santosh
%Y Agarwal, Amit
%Y Gupta, Vivek
%Y Kementchedjhieva, Yova
%Y Garimella, Aparna
%Y Hou, Yufang
%S The Proceedings of Workshop on Document Intelligence and Understanding
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-477-4
%F kumar-etal-2026-rag
%X RAG systems are usually compared as complete pipelines, making it difficult to attribute improvements to individual components. We evaluate chunking, retrieval, fusion, and reranking through a full factorial design with paired component substitutions and equal context budgets. Across five benchmarks, chunking interacts with retrieval architecture, BM25 fusion changes direction by domain, and reranking is the only intervention we test that remains beneficial across nearly all upstream configurations. Claim-level transitions further show that similar net recall can conceal very different changes in visible evidence. These findings demonstrate that RAG components cannot be ranked independently and motivate interaction-aware evaluation instead of winner-take-all pipeline comparisons.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.docinsights-1.22/
%P 303-323
Markdown (Informal)
[RAG Components Are Not Independently Rankable](https://aclanthology.org/2026.docinsights-1.22/) (Kumar et al., DocInsights 2026)
ACL
- Vishnu Prasad Vijaya Kumar, Iaroslav Neverov, Pavel Chizhov, Anton Changalidis, Vaiva Kazanaviciute, Pierre-Carl Langlais, Anastasia Stasenko, and Ivan P. Yamshchikov. 2026. RAG Components Are Not Independently Rankable. In The Proceedings of Workshop on Document Intelligence and Understanding, pages 303–323, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.