Input tokens sent to the foundation model (FM) on every call are often a meaningful part of the cost of running Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) at scale. Query-aware compression offers one way to reduce how many of them reach the model. Amazon Bedrock provides the foundation models and features to build RAG applications. RAG retrieval usually tunes for high recall, returning a broad set of potentially relevant chunks so the primary model has thorough source material to work with. This design helps builders feel confident that the right information is available at inference time. As workloads scale, builders often look for ways to optimize the cost-performance tradeoff by reducing the number of input tokens the primary model processes while maintaining answer quality. The open, composable architecture of Amazon Bedrock supports custom post-retrieval processing steps that refine what reaches the primary model.
In this post, we describe a post-retrieval…