Self-Conditioned Positional HNSW for Overlap-Aware Retrieval in Chunked-Document RAG Systems: Method and Industrial Evidence-Quality Audit
Chunked-document retrieval is a common component of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Documents are split into overlapping chunks, embedded, and indexed with approximate nearest-neighbor search such as hierarchical navigable small world graphs (HNSW). Overlap improves boundary coverage but induces a practical failure mode: top-k retrieval often returns near-adjacent chunks that repeat evidence and waste prompt budget. We propose Self-Conditioned Positional HNSW (SCP-HNSW), a lightweight modification that appends a low-dimensional positional code to chunk embeddings and uses a two-pass query procedure to estimate and apply a query-specific document-position prior. SCP-HNSW leav...
| Authors | Nataraj Agaram Sundar, Tejas Morabia |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.DC |
| Published | 1 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 June 2026 |
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