Recoverable Provenance: Making Retrieved Context Usable

Retrieval quality is usually scored on whether the right source is surfaced. This paper argues that findability is the wrong objective for agentic systems, and develops recoverable provenance — a property of a retrieved fragment that lets a downstream agent act on it without re-reading the source.

From found to usable

We characterise the gap between a fragment being present in the context window and being usable in isolation, and give a construction that preserves enough structure for the fragment to stand on its own.