Learning to Route: A Rule-Driven Agent Framework for Hybrid-Source Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on general Question Answering (QA), yet they often struggle in domain-specific scenarios where accurate and up-to-date information is required. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this limitation by enriching LLMs with external knowledge, but existing systems primarily rely on unstructured documents, while largely overlooking relational databases, which provide precise, timely, and efficiently queryable factual information, serving as indispensable infrastructure in domains such as finance, healthcare, and scientific research. Motivated by this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis that reveals three central observations: (i) databases and documents offer complementary strengths across queries, (ii) naively combining both sources introduces noise and cost without consistent accuracy gains, and (iii) selecting the most suitable source for each query is crucial to balance effectiveness and efficiency. We further observe that query types show consistent regularities in their alignment with retrieval paths, suggesting that routing decisions can be effectively guided by systematic rules that capture these patterns. Building on these insights, we propose a rule-driven routing framework. A routing agent scores candidate augmentation paths based on explicit rules and selects the most suitable one; a rule-making expert agent refines the rules over time using QA feedback to maintain adaptability; and a path-level meta-cache reuses past routing decisions for semantically similar queries to reduce latency and cost. Experiments on three QA benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms static strategies and learned routing baselines, achieving higher accuracy while maintaining moderate computational cost.