AI RESEARCH
Not All Queries Need Rewriting: When Prompt-Only LLM Refinement Helps and Hurts Dense Retrieval
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2603.13301v1 Announce Type: cross Prompt-only, single-step LLM query rewriting, where a rewrite is generated from the query alone without retrieval feedback, is commonly used in production RAG pipelines, but its effect on dense retrieval is poorly understood. We present a systematic empirical study across three BEIR benchmarks, two dense retrievers, and multiple