Vector Search As Nearest Neighbor Matching: RAG-based Policy Learning in Causal Inference

We propose one-step and two-step methods for policy learning with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We formulate RAG-based action selection under the potential outcome framework. In the two-step method, vector search retrieves action-specific neighboring evidence in an embedding space, the generator estimates conditional expected outcomes or their contrasts, and a plug-in rule selects an action. This formulation connects action-specific vector search with nearest-neighbor matching in causal inference. We decompose the regret of the two-step method into candidate-generation regret and within-candidate choice regret, and we bound the latter using prediction-error guarantees for nearest-neighbor estimators and transformers. We evaluate the one-step method directly as a policy because its intermediate computation is unobserved.

Source: arXiv:2607.18225v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18225v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.18225v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18225v1