{"paper":{"title":"Three Sides of Retrieval: Factorial Evidence for Document-Side, Query-Side, and Answer-Side Complementarity in RAG","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.IR","authors_text":"Ng S. T. Chong","submitted_at":"2026-06-19T14:33:01Z","abstract_excerpt":"RAG systems rely on chunking, which destroys structural information in documents. Existing heading-based retrieval (Jeong et al., 2025) requires multiple LLM calls per document and returns sub-chunks within matched sections. We introduce ToC-guided page retrieval, which infers headings from visual formatting without LLM calls, embeds them as a parallel index, and loads full page sections. Across 1,280 conditions on 8 enterprise documents (5 to 195 pages), we find: (1) ToC is a significant main effect on answer quality (d = +0.41, p = 0.031), with the largest gains in completeness (+0.40) and u"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.24781","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/2607.24781/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"}