# Reducing Redundancy in Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Chunk Filtering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24334 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24334/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 22 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [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)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14233/) (2023)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06499/) (2021)
- [RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18059/) (2024)
- [Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10496/) (2022)
- [RankRAG: Unifying Context Ranking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02485/) (2024)
- [ConvFinQA: Exploring the Chain of Numerical Reasoning in Conversational Finance Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03849/) (2022)
- [Late Chunking: Contextual Chunk Embeddings Using Long-Context Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04701/) (2024)
- [WebFAQ: A Multilingual Collection of Natural Q&A Datasets for Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20936/) (2025)
- [Lost in the Middle: An Emergent Property from Information Retrieval Demands in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10276/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Cross-Attention Calibrated Deduplication for Retrieval-Augmented Generation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24332/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chunking methods often create excessive redundancy, increasing storage costs and slowing retrieval. This study explores chunk filtering strategies, such as semantic, topic-based, and named-entity-based methods in order to reduce the indexed corpus while preserving retrieval quality. Experiments are conducted on multiple corpora. Retrieval performance is evaluated using a token-based framework based on precision, recall, and intersection-over-union metrics. Results indicate that entity-based filtering can reduce vector index size by approximately 25% to 36% while maintaining high retrieval quality close to the baseline. These findings suggest that redundancy introduced during chunking can be effectively reduced through lightweight filtering, improving the efficiency of retrieval-oriented components in RAG pipelines.