Your one-shot RAG system confidently answers ‘George H....

The core problem is that the required information—who won the election following the dissolution of the Soviet Union—was never present in the original retrieved chunks. Because the gold document was never in the pool, increasing the value of k or changing the embedding model will not solve the issue. A robust solution involves shifting from a one-shot retrieval approach to an iterative mechanism, such as IRCoT or self-ask, which allows the system to perform multiple hops to gather the necessary facts.