AB-RAG: Adaptive Budgeted Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Question Answering
AB-RAG is a training-free, backbone-agnostic framework that dynamically adjusts retrieval efforts based on a confidence estimate derived from model certainty, answer-evidence agreement, and retrieval score variance. This approach allows systems to decide whether to stop or retrieve more evidence within a fixed budget without retraining the underlying language model.