Beyond Static RAG: Using 1958 Biochemistry to Beat Multi-Hop Retrieval by 14% - DEV Community

This page introduces Induced-Fit Retrieval (IFR), a dynamic approach addressing RAG limitations in multi-hop question answering. Inspired by Koshland's 1958 biochemistry model, IFR mutates query vectors at each traversal step to discover semantically distant but logically connected information. Testing 30 queries across various graph sizes yielded 14.3% higher nDCG@10 compared to baseline RAG-rerank, 15% multi-hop hit rates where traditional RAG scored 0%, and O(1) latency scaling maintaining ~10ms regardless of data size. The authors transparently share failures, including catastrophic drift issues, with v2 implementing an "Alpha Floor" mechanism. Open-source prototype, raw results, ablation studies, and technical reports are available.