Equation 12 · Retrieval Is an Evidence System, Not a Memory
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The second loss is retrieval-side rather than representation-side. If the answer to a question spans a chunk boundary, no top- k over those chunks can supply it in one piece; the system must either retrieve both halves and hope the generator reassembles them, or fail. Overlap windows mitigate this and do not solve it, because the correct overlap depends on the query.
Sources cited in the article section
- [9] Late Chunking: Contextual Chunk Embeddings Using Long-Context Embedding Models ↗
- [10] Introducing Contextual Retrieval ↗
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