BRANE

BRANE: Natural Language Query-to-Configuration Selection for Retrieval Agents

BRANE is a system that dynamically selects retrieval agent pipeline configurations (LLM, retriever, number of hops, synthesis strategy) at inference time based on per-query characteristics and a cost-quality target. It uses an LLM to extract workload features from each query, then applies lightweight per-configuration predictors to estimate correctness, selecting the configuration that maximizes predicted accuracy penalized by cost. Evaluated on MuSiQue, BrowseComp-Plus, and FinanceBench, BRANE matches best-fixed-configuration accuracy at up to 89% lower cost and outperforms LLM-routing and fine-tuned Qwen3-4B baselines. The work frames per-query pipeline configuration as a practical alternative to static workload-level tuning.