# Controlling Authority Retrieval: A Missing Retrieval Objective for Authority-Governed Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14488 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14488/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10509/) (2022)
- [MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00573/) (2021)
- [Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10496/) (2022)
- [From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14802/) (2025)
- [Seven Failure Points When Engineering a Retrieval Augmented Generation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05856/) (2024)
- [On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21038/) (2025)
- [PropRAG: Guiding Retrieval with Beam Search over Proposition Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18070/) (2025)
- [Regulatory Compliance through Doc2Doc Information Retrieval: A case study in EU/UK legislation where text similarity has limitations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10726/) (2021)
- [Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14191/) (2024)
- [VersionRAG: Version-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Evolving Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08109/) (2025)
- [RIRAG: Regulatory Information Retrieval and Answer Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05677/) (2024)
- [CaseFacts: A Benchmark for Legal Fact-Checking and Precedent Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17230/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Beyond Probabilistic Similarity: Structural, Temporal, and Causal Limitations of Retrieval-Augmented Generation in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09724/) (2026)
- [Authority Before Utility: Non-Compensatory Control for Persistent LLM Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37474/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In law, regulatory regimes for pharmaceuticals and software security, newer authorities can revoke older established ones even when semantically distant. We call this CAR: retrieving the currently active authority frontier for a semantic anchor q, that is, front(cl(A_k(q))). This differs from finding the most similar document by relevance score: argmax_d s(q, d). Theorem 4 characterizes when a set R truly covers the active authority set for q with TCA(R, q)=1, providing conditions necessary and sufficient for any retrieved set R: frontier inclusion (front(cl(A_k(q))) contained in R) and no-ignored-superseder (no superseding document exists in the corpus outside R). Proposition 2 shows that TCA@k <= phi(q) * R_anchor(q) in the worst case over any scope-indexed algorithm, proved by an adversarial permutation argument. We evaluated on three real-world datasets: security advisories (Dense TCA@5=0.270, two-stage 0.975), SCOTUS overruling pairs (Dense TCA=0.172, two-stage 0.926), and FDA drug records (Dense TCA=0.064, two-stage 0.774). A GPT-4o-mini experiment shows Dense RAG produces explicit "not patched" claims for 39% of queries where a patch exists; two-stage cuts this to 16%. Four benchmark datasets, domain adapters, and a single-command scorer are released at https://github.com/andremir/car-retrieval.