What question did this study set out to answer?

To determine the retrieval efficacy and failure modes of AI agents relying solely on authored one-line-digest index files compared to associative search tools.

August 16, 2026Open Access

Reading More, Finding Less: A Pre-Registered Anatomy of Mis-Routing in Curated Agent Retrieval

View Full Paper

Ask AI

Bookmark

Authors

RARashid Azarang

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Controlled experiment reveals curated index routing significantly underperforms associative search in AI agents, demonstrating localization failures rather than comprehension deficits.

Key Points

To determine the retrieval efficacy and failure modes of AI agents relying solely on authored one-line-digest index files compared to associative search tools.
Assessed an AI agent's ability to answer 102 questions using an authored one-line-digest index as its exclusive retrieval mechanism versus associative search (grep) over the same corpus.
Conducted a pre-registered replication study across 141 documents and 120 frozen questions using pre-committed analyzers and mechanical adjudication.
In the primary evaluation, associative search routed the agent to the correct document in 80.4% of cases compared to 52.0% for the curated index; once routed correctly, agent answer accuracy was 86.8% (difficulty-matched oracle arm Fisher p = 0.80).
The pre-registered replication confirmed search superiority over curated indexing in accuracy (63.3% vs. 50.8%), localization (75.0% vs. 62.5%), and lower wrong-stop rates (18.3% vs. 34.2%).
Promoting files into a durable memory directory failed to facilitate subsequent retrieval, with promoted documents read in only 2 of 157 eligible opportunities.

Cite This Study

Rashid Azarang (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a817a80f2fb91fc834ae677 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21947917

View Full Paper

Ask AI

Bookmark

Implication

Controlled experiment reveals curated index routing significantly underperforms associative search in AI agents, demonstrating localization failures rather than comprehension deficits.

Reading More, Finding Less: A Pre-Registered Anatomy of Mis-Routing in Curated Agent Retrieval

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

Reading More, Finding Less: A Pre-Registered Anatomy of Mis-Routing in Curated Agent Retrieval

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

Also Consider

Also Consider