arXiv cs.LGPaper
Retrieved but not ranked: surface-form bias in structural retrieval, from mathematics to agent trajectories
This is a damning paper if you're relying on retrieval for reasoning or planning. Embeddings anchor on literal tokens, not task structure. The implication for RAG and in-context learning is clear: top-K retrieval by cosine similarity will fail silently on problems that require structural understanding. Reranking or semantic search alone won't fix it.