ScalableRAG did exact corpus operations without ingesting anything, and on aggregative questions scored 71.74 where the leading baseline scored 36.23
AspireAI community · arXiv
*RAG retrievers can find evidence but cannot count, intersect or aggregate it - those are corpus-level operations, and getting them normally means paying for ingestion.* ScalableRAG closes that gap with a persistent typed-set workspace: an agent builds named document and value sets at query time and composes them through set algebra, typed extraction, aggregation and diagnostics. Zero-Ingestion ScalableRAG needs no preprocessing, not even a vector index.
It matches the leading baseline on four conventional QA benchmarks (74.75 versus 74.64) and on the aggregative Hotels-50 it beats every evaluated system - 71.74, which is 36.23 points above the leading baseline and 40.22 points above A-RAG. Remove the workspace and Hotels-50 collapses to 38.4, which is the clearest evidence that the workspace is doing the work. On Hotels-350, the partition SRAG itself reports on, ScalableRAG leads SRAG by 9.3 points. The limited-ingestion variant is the only evaluated system above 80 judge score at 5M documents, at 13 to 16 seconds per question and under 20 minutes of ingestion. The limitation: the headline margin is concentrated in aggregative query sets, and conventional QA is parity rather than a win.
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