Less can be More: Relieving RAG Bottlenecks via Evidence Frontloading and Pressure-Adaptive Budgeting

Existing methods for improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) efficiency mainly optimize downstream LLM generation, such as context compression or serving optimization. However, RAG is an end-to-end system, and its bottleneck can shift between upstream reranking and downstream generation under different serving loads and reranking budgets.In this paper, we first empirically characterize this shifting-bottleneck behavior and show that upstream reranking can become the dominant bottleneck under high query rates or large reranking budgets. Reducing the reranking budget can relieve this bottleneck, but it may also drop supporting evidence and degrade recall. To address this problem, we propose textbftextsfPACE (Prioritized Adaptive Coverage of Evidence), a training-free framework that combines textitevidence frontloading with textitpressure-adaptive budgeting. textsfPACE first reorders candidates by marginal evidence coverage, prioritizing documents that are query-relevant, complementary, and useful for forming multi-hop evidence chains. We show that this objective is monotone submodular, giving greedy selection a (1-1/e) approximation guarantee. textsfPACE then dynamically adjusts the reranking budget according to the relative pressure of the reranker and the LLM. Experiments on three multi-hop QA datasets and online serving simulations show that textsfPACE improves evidence recall, reduces p95 latency under ranking-heavy workloads. More importantly, the two components together reveal that textitless can be more: an evidence-dense top-ranked candidates enable higher final recall with fewer reranked documents.