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Predictable Failure in Multi-Hop Retrieval: Score-Distributional Confidence Scoring and Abstention

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 18, 2026 · UTC

Multi-hop retrieval failures are not uniformly distributed across queries: they cluster in structurally predictable subpopulations. We prove two results formalizing this structure. First (CWAR Reducibility): confident-failure reduction is achievable if and only if retrieval features carry mutual information about success, a condition satisfied by LLM-judge pipelines but substantially weaker in dense-only settings, explaining the AUC-AC gap between regimes. Second (Feature Regime Complementarity): no single ANN score feature achieves best predictive performance across all failure regimes; the d

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