Is Agentic RAG worth it?
RAG systems have evolved from simple retriever-generator pipelines to sophisticated workflows. It remains unclear when to use Enhanced RAG (fixed pipelines with dedicated modules) versus Agentic RAG (LLM orchestrates the entire process dynamically).
This research provides the first empirical comparison.
Enhanced RAG adds pre-defined components to address specific weaknesses: routers to determine if retrieval is needed, query rewriters to improve alignment, and rerankers to refine document selection. The workflow is fixed and manually engineered.
Agentic RAG takes a different approach. The LLM decides which actions to perform, when to perform them, and whether to iterate. No extra components beyond the basic knowledge base, retriever, and generator. The model controls everything.
The researchers evaluated both paradigms across four dimensions on QA and information retrieval tasks.
User intent handling: Agentic slightly outperforms Enhanced on most tasks, but Enhanced wins decisively on FEVER (+28.8 F1 points), where the agent often retrieves unnecessarily.
Query rewriting: Agentic RAG achieves 55.6 average NDCG@10 compared to 52.8 for Enhanced, showing the agent can adaptively rewrite queries when beneficial.
Document refinement: Enhanced RAG with reranking (49.5 NDCG@10) outperforms Agentic (43.9). Dedicated reranker modules beat iterative retrieval attempts.
Agentic RAG is far more sensitive to model capability. With weaker models, Enhanced RAG maintains stability while Agentic performance degrades significantly.
Cost analysis reveals Agentic RAG requires 2-10x more computation time and tokens due to multi-step reasoning.
The choice between Enhanced and Agentic RAG depends on your constraints. Enhanced RAG offers predictability, lower costs, and stability with weaker models. Agentic RAG provides flexibility but requires stronger models and more compute.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2601.07711
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