Multi‑hop Retrieval for Enterprise Knowledge‑Driven Q&A

📋 Concise Diagnosis

Symptom Typical Cause Immediate Remedy

Answer stops after a single paragraph Query spans multiple knowledge islands; single‑vector lookup returns only the first island Decompose into sub‑questions and chain retrieval hops

Stale regulatory numbers appear in the response Context window contains cached documents, but the live value is governed by an external API Add a “live‑value” hop that calls the authoritative service

Latency spikes when depth > 3 Each hop launches a separate retrieval round; network and model inference accumulate Profile per‑hop latency, enforce a cumulative budget, and consider early‑stop criteria

Business rule is violated despite correct evidence Rule logic lives in deterministic code, but the LLM is asked to “reason” about it Encode the rule as executable Python (or a policy engine) and feed its result as a system prompt

⏩ Decision Flow

flowchart TD A["Receive user question"] B["Parse & Detect Multi‑hop…