Can QPP Choose the Right Query Variant? Evaluating Query Variant Selection for RAG Pipelines

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22661v1
• Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:36:40 GMT
• Title: Can QPP Choose the Right Query Variant? Evaluating Query Variant Selection for RAG Pipelines
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made query reformulation ubiquitous in modern retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.<n>We investigate Query Performance Prediction (QPP) as a mechanism for variant selection across ad-hoc retrieval and end-to-end RAG.
• Score: 48.34524144147475
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made query reformulation ubiquitous in modern retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, enabling the generation of multiple semantically equivalent query variants. However, executing the full pipeline for every reformulation is computationally expensive, motivating selective execution: can we identify the best query variant before incurring downstream retrieval and generation costs? We investigate Query Performance Prediction (QPP) as a mechanism for variant selection across ad-hoc retrieval and end-to-end RAG. Unlike traditional QPP, which estimates query difficulty across topics, we study intra-topic discrimination - selecting the optimal reformulation among competing variants of the same information need. Through large-scale experiments on TREC-RAG using both sparse and dense retrievers, we evaluate pre- and post-retrieval predictors under correlation- and decision-based metrics. Our results reveal a systematic divergence between retrieval and generation objectives: variants that maximize ranking metrics such as nDCG often fail to produce the best generated answers, exposing a "utility gap" between retrieval relevance and generation fidelity. Nevertheless, QPP can reliably identify variants that improve end-to-end quality over the original query. Notably, lightweight pre-retrieval predictors frequently match or outperform more expensive post-retrieval methods, offering a latency-efficient approach to robust RAG.

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