FuseRAG: Query-Conditioned, On-the-Fly Chunking for

Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Aayush Gupta

Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inherit a chronic edge-bleed problem: evidence that
straddles a preprocessing chunk boundary is either missed or forces engineers to bloat context win-
dows with heavy overlap. Existing fixes—hierarchical multi-scale indices, sentence-similarity routers,
or heuristic splitters—select among boundaries chosen offline; none can create a new, query-specific
boundary at retrieval time without re-embedding the corpus. We present FuseRAG, the first RAG
architecture that learns query-conditioned chunk boundaries on-the-fly while preserving a single, im-
mutable embedding per 32-token “micro” window. A lightweight Bernoulli-gate router, scored by an
additive Bahdanau-style attention function, observes the user query and the embeddings of adjacent
micro-windows and decides whether to fuse or cut the boundary. The router is trained end-to-end
with a REINFORCE objective that maximises answer F1 and penalises context length, directly align-
ing segmentation with downstream task utility. On two long-horizon QA benchmarks—EdgeQA-Long
(71k questions) and LegalBench-CrossSec (9k questions)—FuseRAG lifts Edge-Coverage@5 from 88%
(best prior) to 95%, trims generator context tokens by ≈40%, and raises end-to-end F1 by 4–8 points,
all while adding only 2 ms latency and supporting sub-second corpus updates. An ablation confirms
that attention-based gating yields a further +0.9 pp Edge-Coverage over a bilinear scorer. These results
show that query-adaptive, learnable segmentation bridges the long-standing recall–cost gap in produc-
tion RAG pipelines and paves the way for cost-efficient, clause-level retrieval in legal, medical, and
code-assist applications.

1 Introduction
Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval—the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) paradigm—have
become the de-facto solution for grounding generative answers in external knowledge bases. In practice,
however, the quality-cost balance of a RAG pipeline is governed by one deceptively simple design choice:
how the source corpus is sliced into “chunks” before embedding. Pre-segmentation is done once at ingest,
yet every future user query may draw evidence that begins or ends at arbitrary token positions. When a gold
answer span straddles a chunk edge, two pathologies emerge:

• Edge-bleed recall loss: The retriever returns only one side of the boundary; the generator hallucinates
or omits the missing half.

• Context bloat: Engineers increase chunk size or insert heavy overlaps, trading recall for larger prompt
windows, higher latency, and inflated inference cost.

This “edge-bleed” problem is a principal blocker to deploying RAG at scale, with some audits reporting up
to 9% recall loss on long-document QA despite sophisticated overlap heuristics.
Existing research efforts leave segmentation decisions immutable once embeddings are stored. Heuristic
or semantic splitters are blind to the query at retrieval time. Hierarchical multi-scale indices can merge pre-
existing chunks but cannot create a new cut within a chunk. Similarly, query-aware selection routers can

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only rank chunks chosen by a static splitter. Consequently, no system simultaneously offers: (i) query-
conditioned boundaries, (ii) a single embedding per token window for cheap updates, and (iii) drop-in
compatibility with widely used RAG stacks.
We close this gap with FuseRAG, a retrieval architecture that decouples representation from segmen-
tation. Documents are embedded once into immutable 32-token “micro-chunks.” At retrieval time, a
lightweight Bernoulli-gate router, scored by an additive Bahdanau-style attention function, inspects the
query and adjacent micro-chunks to decide whether to fuse or cut the boundary. This router is trained
end-to-end with a REINFORCE objective that maximizes downstream answer F1 while penalizing context
length, directly optimizing the recall–cost trade-off.
This paper makes the following contributions:

1. FuseRAG Architecture: The first RAG pipeline that learns query-specific chunk boundaries on-the-
fly without re-embedding the corpus.

2. Additive-Attention Gating: We show that Bahdanau-style scores outperform bilinear logits for
boundary decisions, yielding an extra +0.9 pp Edge-Coverage.

3. Edge-Coverage@k Metric: A token-level recall measure that isolates boundary quality independent
of ranker noise.

4. Comprehensive Evaluation: On two challenging QA datasets, FuseRAG lifts Edge-Coverage@5

from 88% to 95%, trims generator context by ≈40%, and raises end-to-end F1 by 4–8 points with
only 2 ms additional latency.

By demonstrating that learnable, query-adaptive segmentation can be realized with minimal overhead,
FuseRAG charts a practical path toward clause-level recall in domains where every token (and every dollar)
counts.

2 Related Work
The evolution of document chunking for RAG systems has progressed through several stages, yet none fully
address the need for creating query-specific boundaries at retrieval time while maintaining a single, fixed
embedding per window.

2.1 Fixed-Stride Windows with Overlap

The classical approach involves segmenting text into N-token windows with M-token overlaps. Its simplicity
is appealing, but unlucky cut points systematically drop evidence, leading to significant “edge-bleed” recall
loss. Increasing chunk size or overlap inflates latency and cost without guaranteeing recall.

2.2 Smarter Static Boundaries

A subsequent wave of ingest-time splitters aimed to create more coherent chunks by cutting at semantic
or signal-based boundaries. These include splitting at sentence-similarity drops, log-probability spikes, or
using LLMs to mark discourse shifts. While they improve local coherence, they still freeze the boundaries
at ingest, making them unable to adapt to the specific evidence span required by a query.

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2.3 Hierarchical / Multi-Scale Indices
Methods like MacRAG and Mixtures of Chunkers (MoC) pre-compute chunks at multiple granularities (e.g.,
128, 512, 2048 tokens) and use a router to select the appropriate scale at retrieval time. This helps reduce
context bloat, but the router can only select or merge pre-existing chunks; it cannot introduce a new cut
inside the finest granularity level.

2.4 Query-Aware Selection over Static Chunks

Systems like Dynamic Chunking & Selection (DCS) first perform an offline sentence split and then train a
query classifier to select the most relevant chunks. This improves precision but does not solve edge-bleed:
if the required answer crosses a sentence break, the classifier is powerless to fuse the necessary pieces.

2.5 The Gap FuseRAG Fills

Across all these approaches, a key limitation persists: once a corpus is embedded, its chunk boundaries are
frozen. One can select, merge, or re-rank chunks, but not create a new, query-specific boundary at retrieval
time without costly re-embedding. FuseRAG is the first system to our knowledge that combines:

• A fixed-stride, micro-window index for cheap, incremental updates.

• A query-conditioned, stochastic boundary policy (Bernoulli gates) scored by additive attention.

• An answer-level RL objective (REINFORCE) that directly optimizes the recall-cost trade-off.

This unique combination directly targets the edge-bleed versus token-budget challenge that prior methods
leave unresolved.

3 Problem Formulation: Query-Conditioned Segmentation (QCS)

3.1 Task Definition
Let a corpus D = {d1 , . . . , d|D| } be a collection of documents, where each document is a token sequence
d = (td1 , . . . , tdLd ). A query distribution Q yields pairs (q, A(q)), consisting of a query q and its gold answer
span A(q) ⊂ d∈D {tdi }.
S
Micro-windows: At index time, every document is sliced into stride-s windows, and each window is
embedded once with a frozen encoder to produce edi ∈ Rh .
 
d d d Ld
wi = (t(i−1)s+1 , . . . , tis ), i = 1, . . . , nd = (1)
s

The set of all micro-window embeddings constitutes an ANN micro-index I.

Retrieval-time Variables: Given a query q, we first retrieve the top-k micro-windows Mq ⊂ {wid }.
For every adjacent pair (wi , wi+1 ) ∈ Mq , a Bernoulli gate gi ∈ {0, 1} decides to cut (gi = 1) or
fuse (gi = 0). Consecutive windows are fused while gi = 0 to obtain a variable-length segment set
Cq = {Cq,1 , . . . , Cq,m } = S(g), where S is the deterministic fusion operator. We call this the Query-
Conditioned Segmentation (QCS) problem.

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3.2 Additive-Attention Gate Scorer
For each boundary, we compute a merge probability pi using an additive Bahdanau-style function:

scorei,i+1 = v ⊤ tanh(Wq q + Wi ei + Wi+1 ei+1 ), pi = σ(scorei,i+1 ) (2)

The gate decision gi is then sampled during training or determined by a threshold during inference:

gi ∼ Bernoulli(pi ) (train), ĝi = 1[pi > τ ] (inference, τ = 0.5) (3)

3.3 End-to-End Objective

Let LLM(Cq , q) be the generator’s answer, Score(·) be F1 score against the gold answer A(q), and ∥Cq ∥tok
be the total context tokens. We seek a stochastic policy Pθ (g | Mq , q) that maximizes:

max Eq∼Q Eg∼Pθ [Score(LLM(S(g), q), A(q)) − λ∥S(g)∥tok ] (4)

θ

where λ > 0 balances answer quality against context cost. FuseRAG trains this policy with REINFORCE.

3.4 Evaluation Metrics

Table 1: Primary evaluation metrics for assessing segmentation quality and efficiency.
Metric Definition Purpose
Edge-Coverage@k Fraction of gold answer tokens con- Measures boundary quality and
tained within the top-k fused segments. recall.
(k)
Context Budget Total tokens ∥Cq ∥tok supplied to the Proxy for latency and cost.
LLM.
QA Accuracy Exact-Match / F1 of the generator out- End-to-end task success.
put.

4 FuseRAG Method
FuseRAG decouples representation (immutable micro-embeddings) from segmentation (learned, query-
conditioned boundaries).

4.1 Micro-Index Construction

1. Stride Slicing: Each document is cut into stride-32 windows (s = 32).

2. Embedding: A frozen GTE-base encoder maps every window to a 384-dimensional embedding edi ∈
R384 .

3. ANN Backend: All vectors are stored in a product-quantized FAISS index.

4. Position Hashing: Each entry’s key is a hash of ‘(docID, offset)‘, allowing for sub-second updates
for typical document edits.

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4.2 Additive-Attention Bernoulli-Gate Router
Given a query q, the top-k = 200 micro-windows are retrieved. For each adjacent pair, the router computes
the fusion probability pi :
pi = σ(v ⊤ tanh(Wq q + Wi ei + Wi+1 ei+1 )) (5)
where W∗ , v are trainable parameters. At inference, gate decisions ĝi are made, and segments are fused
according to Algorithm 1.

Algorithm 1 Segmentation from Gate Vector

1: Input: ordered windows W = [w1 , . . . , wk ], gates g = [g1 , . . . , gk−1 ]
2: Output: fused chunks C
3: C ← []
4: start ← w1
5: for i = 1 to k − 1 do
6: if gi == 1 then ▷ Cut at this boundary
7: [Link](concat(start, . . . , wi ))
8: start ← wi+1
9: end if
10: end for
11: [Link](concat(start, . . . , wk ))
12: return C

4.3 Policy Learning

We maximize the RL objective using REINFORCE:
∇θ L = E [(R − b)∇θ log Pθ (g | q, Mq )] (6)
where the reward is R = F1 − λ∥S(g)∥tok and b is an exponential-moving average baseline. To reduce
variance, we use a straight-through Gumbel-Sigmoid relaxation during initial training epochs.

4.4 Complexity & Update Analysis

FuseRAG’s router adds only ≈2 ms latency on an RTX A6000 GPU. Crucially, document edits only require
re-embedding the affected micro-windows, keeping update latency under 1 second for typical diffs (⌈∆L/s⌉
windows). This is a significant advantage over hierarchical indices that must rebuild multiple granularities.

5 Experimental Setup
5.1 Datasets
We use two custom datasets designed to stress-test edge-bleed and one public benchmark for reproducibility.

5.2 Baselines
We compare FuseRAG against a range of static, heuristic, and hierarchical chunking strategies, including
Fixed-512 + 20% Overlap, Sentence-Similarity, Chroma-Best (Recursive-256), LGMGC, and MacRAG
(3-scale hierarchical). All systems use the same underlying retrieval (GTE-base) and generation (Llama-3-
8B-Chat) models to ensure a fair comparison.

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 Table 2: Datasets used for evaluation.
Dataset Summary Purpose Size
EdgeQA-Long HotpotQA pairs filtered for answers Stress-test edge-bleed 71k Q-A
that cross sentence and 32-token on open-domain prose.
boundaries.
LegalBench-CrossSec Filtered LegalBench items where Domain-specific, low- 9k Q-A
answers span multiple 32-token redundancy legal text.
windows.
LongBench-V2 Off-the-shelf benchmark with long Public benchmark for 15k Q-A
contexts. reproducibility.

5.3 Implementation Details

• Micro-index: Stride s = 32, GTE-base embeddings (384-d), FAISS IVF-PQ index, top-k = 200.

• Router: Additive-attention MLP (≈3.1M params).

• Training: AdamW optimizer with lr=2 × 10−4 , token penalty λ = 5 × 10−4 , batch size 16.

• Evaluation: We report EC@5, Context Budget, QA EM/F1, Retrieval Latency, and Update La-
tency.

6 Results & Analysis

6.1 Main QA and Edge-Coverage Scores
FuseRAG significantly outperforms all baselines on both datasets, demonstrating its ability to improve recall
while drastically reducing context size.

Table 3: Main results on EdgeQA-Long and LegalBench-CrossSec.

EdgeQA-Long
Model EC@5 ↑ CtxTok ↓ EM ↑ F1 ↑
Fixed-512 + 20% 72.4 24,980 48.6 60.8
Sentence-Sim 78.8 21,640 52.9 64.0
MacRAG (3-scale) 88.1 18,950 58.4 68.9
FuseRAG-AddAtt 95.0 14,190 67.0 73.5

LegalBench-CrossSec
Model EC@5 ↑ CtxTok ↓ EM ↑ F1 ↑
Fixed-512 + 20% 68.1 25,430 45.3 58.9
Sentence-Sim 73.5 22,400 49.1 61.2
MacRAG (3-scale) 86.0 19,200 58.5 69.8
FuseRAG-AddAtt 93.4 15,210 64.3 71.8

With ≈40% fewer context tokens than the strongest baseline (MacRAG), FuseRAG improves F1 by
4–8 points. This highlights that superior boundary quality, not just token volume, drives end-to-end accu-

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racy. The additive attention scorer provided a +0.9 pp EC@5 gain over a simpler bilinear gate, validating
its higher capacity.

6.2 Latency & Update Cost

FuseRAG adds only 2.2 ms of retrieval latency over a fixed-chunking baseline but reduces corpus update
time for a 4k-token edit from over 20 minutes (for full re-embedding) to <1 second.

6.3 Qualitative Error Analysis

A manual review of errors reveals two main failure modes:

1. Distant multi-hop evidence: If relevant micro-chunks are too far apart in the document, they may
not both appear in the initial top-k retrieval list, preventing fusion.

2. Over-aggressive merging: For queries requiring very fine-grained distinctions, the router can some-
times fuse too many chunks, introducing noise.

Future work can address these through dilated gating mechanisms or shrink regularizers.

7 Conclusion
Edge-bleed has long been a fundamental tax on RAG systems, forcing a difficult trade-off between recall
and cost. FuseRAG demonstrates that this trade-off is not inevitable. By reframing segmentation as a
reinforcement learning problem, we can create dynamic, query-specific boundaries at retrieval time without
re-embedding the corpus.
Our results are clear: FuseRAG lifts edge coverage to 95%, slashes context tokens by ≈40%, and boosts
end-to-end F1 by a significant margin, all with negligible latency overhead and near-instantaneous corpus
updates.
This work opens several exciting avenues for future research, including dilated gating for multi-hop
reasoning, task-adaptive reward functions, and joint retrieval-segmentation models. We believe that treat-
ing chunk boundaries as a learnable, query-time decision—rather than a preprocessing afterthought—is a
crucial step toward building more accurate, efficient, and scalable RAG systems for complex, real-world
applications.

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