RAG Interview Questions #18 - The Hop-Count Paradox

When predicting query complexity upfront silently memorizes your pipeline's weaknesses, and why treating retrieval as an evidence-gated policy prevents massive latency waste.

You’re in a Senior ML Engineer interview at Google and the interviewer asks:

“Adaptive RAG routes queries by predicted hop count, but nobody labels this question needs 2 hops. The paper bootstraps silver labels by brute-forcing every hop count and keeping whichever one got the right answer. What’s the ceiling that creates?”

Don’t say: “Silver labels are n…