Adaptive Query Routing: A Tier-Based Framework for Hybrid Retrieval Across Financial, Legal, and Medical Documents

TL;DR

This paper evaluates and compares three retrieval architectures—Vector RAG, Tree Reasoning, and a new Adaptive Hybrid Retrieval—across financial, legal, and medical documents, highlighting their strengths and limitations for different query types.

Contribution

It introduces the Adaptive Hybrid Retrieval framework and a four-tier query benchmark, demonstrating how different retrieval methods excel at various query complexities.

Findings

Tree Reasoning achieves the highest overall score (0.900).

Hybrid AHR outperforms on cross-reference and multi-section queries.

Cross-reference recall is 100% for tree-based and hybrid approaches.

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard paradigm for grounding Large Language Model outputs in external knowledge. Lumer et al. [1] presented the first systematic evaluation comparing vector-based agentic RAG against hierarchical node-based reasoning systems for financial document QA across 1,200 SEC filings, finding vector-based systems achieved a 68% win rate. Concurrently, the PageIndex framework [2] demonstrated 98.7% accuracy on FinanceBench through purely reasoning-based retrieval. This paper extends their work by: (i) implementing and evaluating three retrieval architectures: Vector RAG, Tree Reasoning, and the proposed Adaptive Hybrid Retrieval (AHR) across financial, legal, and medical domains; (ii) introducing a four-tier query complexity benchmark; and (iii) employing GPT-4-powered LLM-as-judge evaluation. Experiments reveal that Tree Reasoning achieves the highest overall score (0.900), but no single paradigm dominates across all tiers: Vector RAG wins on multi-document synthesis (Tier 4, score 0.900), while the Hybrid AHR achieves the best performance on cross-reference (0.850) and multi-section queries (0.929). Cross-reference recall reaches 100% for tree-based and hybrid approaches versus 91.7% for vector search, quantifying a critical capability gap. Validation on FinanceBench (150 expert-annotated questions on real SEC 10-K and 10-Q filings) confirms and strengthens these findings: Tree Reasoning scores 0.938, Hybrid AHR 0.901, and Vector RAG 0.821, with the Tree--Vector quality gap widening to 11.7 percentage points on real-world documents. These findings support the development of adaptive retrieval systems that dynamically select strategies based on query complexity and document structure. All code and data are publicly available.