RAPTOR

RAPTOR is a retrieval architecture designed to improve retrieval-augmented generation systems by organizing documents into hierarchical structures that enable more effective context retrieval. Traditional RAG systems typically retrieve small text chunks independently, which can limit a model’s ability to understand broader document context. RAPTOR addresses this limitation by recursively embedding, clustering, and summarizing documents to create a tree-structured hierarchy of information. Each level of the tree represents summaries at different levels of abstraction, allowing retrieval to operate at both detailed and high-level conceptual layers. During inference, the system can navigate this hierarchical representation to retrieve information that best matches the user’s query while preserving broader contextual understanding. This approach improves question-answering performance on complex tasks that require reasoning across long documents or multiple sources.