Retrieval

A 150-row benchmark grid looks like the output of a robot having a stroke — until you know the three things each row tells you. A field guide to reading our RAG bake-off: read the parametric floor first, decode the system and lane columns, and ask the only two questions that matter — is it right, and what did it cost?

One failing LoCoMo question turned into a cross-corpus, multi-system benchmark — and a pile of retracted conclusions. Small-N runs lie, cross-vendor numbers are rarely apples-to-apples, and a correctness bug will impersonate an architecture win every time. Run the no-context baseline, 6x your sample, and diff the bytes that reach the model before you trust any RAG number.