When Learned Context Planning Fails to Beat Strong Retrieval: A Controlled Study of Planning, Routing, and Reranking for Long-Context QA
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2609.26976 (cs)
[Submitted on 22 Sep 2026]
Title:When Learned Context Planning Fails to Beat Strong Retrieval: A Controlled Study of Planning, Routing, and Reranking for Long-Context QA
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Abstract:Learned context planning selects evidence atoms before an answer model reasons over them. We test whether this learned selection improves long-context multiple-choice QA after strong retrieval, routing, budgeted-selector, and reranking controls. Our primary diagnostic uses all 503 LongBench-v2 MCQ questions with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. The planner is SFT-trained on outcome-selected traces from 140 training and 28 development questions; because the 503-question analysis includes those questions, it is partly transductive. At an 18k-character budget, anchored hybrid retrieval reaches 36.18% accuracy and BM25 reaches 35.98%, while the best direct planner-guided method reaches 34.19%. On the untouched 152-question test split, anchored hybrid remains higher (42.11% versus 36.84%). Leakage-safe routers cannot convert a large oracle gap. Under tight budgets, the best planner is ahead by only 0.40 points at 6k and loses at 9k; planner-guided reranking has a +1.79-point estimate at 6k with a paired interval crossing zero and ties the control at 9k. Packing-order and score-flatness analyses did not identify a stable mechanism. Under this setup, learned planning is a weak relevance signal rather than a replacement for strong retrieval.
| Comments: | 5 pages. Accepted at the Seventh Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP (Insights 2026), co-located with EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.26976 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.26976v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.26976
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled When Learned Context Planning Fails to Beat Strong Retrieval: A Controlled Study of Planning, Routing, and Reranking for Long-Context QA, by Yingrui Li and 1 other authors
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