PRUNE

RASER: Recoverability-Aware Selective Escalation Router for Multi-Hop Question Answering

RASER introduces a family of lightweight routers that decide whether to escalate retrieval complexity for multi-hop QA without making additional LLM calls. Built on top of one-shot RAG using six derived features, RASER-2 and RASER-3 route queries to progressively more expensive retrieval strategies (PRUNE, IRCoT) only when needed. Across six LLMs and three benchmarks, the routers match SOTA F1 while consuming only 41-49% of the tokens required by always-escalating baselines.