ConCise: Training-Free Conclusion-Chain State Compression for Cost-Efficient Multi-Step RAG Services

Multi-step retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been widely deployed as LLM-powered web services for complex question answering, where iterative retrieval-reasoning rounds deliver strong multi-hop accuracy. However, this paradigm causes historical documents and reasoning traces to accumulate across rounds, inflating cumulative input tokens approximately as O(N2) with progressively increasing noise density. In API-based service architectures, such growth directly amplifies per-request billing cost, network payload, and response latency. Existing compression approaches rely on pretrained modules or GPU-level KV cache access, introducing model hosting overhead incompatible with API-native, Serverless, and edge-side deployments. To address this issue, this paper proposes ConCise, a training-free state-layer protocol that restructures cross-round context transmission for multi-step RAG services. Specifically, ConCise replaces raw-text accumulation with an append-only chain of structured conclusions, compressing cumulative context growth from O(N2) to approximately O(N). Furthermore, a fused generation mechanism is introduced to jointly emit reasoning and conclusions in a single API call, eliminating repeated input billing from serial dual-invocation overhead. Extensive experiments across twelve paired configurations spanning three models, two datasets, and two representative frameworks demonstrate that ConCise achieves 64.63% average token savings while maintaining acceptable accuracy, providing a plug-and-play, deployment-friendly solution for cost-efficient multi-step RAG service optimization.