{"paper":{"title":"Beyond Top-K: Replacing Black-Box Retrieval with Interpretable Agentic Operations","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CL","cs.IR"],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Ayush Vyas, Sagar Tamang, Tabarakul Hazarika","submitted_at":"2026-08-06T17:23:13Z","abstract_excerpt":"Retrieval-augmented generation over long documents is dominated by one design: chunk the text, embed the chunks, and surface the top-k nearest neighbours of the query. We argue that for an important class of documents -- financial statements, audit reports, regulatory returns -- this design is structurally unsound, and we make the argument measurable. On a 780-page government financial report, 86.8% of content lines are table rows, thousands of near-identical figures compete in one embedding space, and a figure inherits its unit from a header a median of 13 lines above it -- so a chunk boundar"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2608.06305","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2608.06305/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}