adaptive-retrieval-10pct-improvement-50pct-cost-reduction

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/mallen-2023-when-not-to-trust-s1-introduction.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:10+00:00

Mallen et al. 2023 Adaptive Retrieval improves POPQA accuracy by up to 10% while reducing GPT-3 API inference cost by approximately 50%.

Summary

Adaptive retrieval, meaning the strategy of choosing what outside knowledge to pull in and when, can make a language model answer noticeably more questions correctly while cutting its running costs roughly in half. This means smarter retrieval isn't just a quality upgrade but a practical way to get more out of the same API budget, making knowledge-augmented systems both more accurate and more affordable to operate.