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A simple RAG baseline matched the complicated pipelines
Stanford researchers report that keeping retrieved passages in their original document order matches or beats multi-stage retrieval pipelines.
research
What changed
In Stronger Baselines for Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Long-Context Language Models, revised January 2026, Alex Laitenberger, Christopher D. Manning and Nelson F. Liu report that a straightforward retrieve-then-read baseline which preserves passages in their original document order matches or outperforms the multi-stage pipelines ReadAgent and RAPTOR across several long-context question-answering benchmarks.
Why you should care
Before you add a reranker, a summariser and a tree index to a client's pipeline, measure the simple version, because it may already be your ceiling.