adaptive-retrieval-latency-reduction-9pct

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/mallen-2023-when-not-to-trust-s6-adaptive-retrieval-using-retrieval.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:12+00:00

Adaptive Retrieval reduces inference latency by up to 9% compared to always-retrieve by skipping retrieval and shortening input for popular-entity queries.

Summary

By recognizing when a query is about a well-known entity, the system skips the step of fetching extra context and feeds a shorter prompt to the model, trimming response time by as much as 9 percent. In practice, this means frequent, high-traffic questions get answered faster without sacrificing answer quality.