Noēsis: Deterministic-First Retrieval with Two-Tier Context Hydration for Factuality-Critical Queries on Small Local Models
A wrong number is worse than no answer. Across factuality-critical domains -- audience metrics, scheduling and rights in media; dosages and lab values in healthcare; figures and citations in finance and legal -- a confident but fabricated value is more damaging than an honest admission of uncertainty. Yet this is the dominant failure mode we observe on small local language models: even when correct evidence is present in context, models fabricate plausible numbers and timestamps. Recent work characterizes a real limit of this regime: below 7B parameters, the bottleneck of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is not retrieval quality but context utilization. We present Noesis, the deterministic-first query plane of the Noesis architecture, which makes every deterministic judgment before generation. Its mechanisms follow from the ingestion architecture (subject of a separate patent application): (a) a producer-side fact layer rendering precomputed metric facts verbatim without ranking; (b) positional addressing with deterministic cross-source alignment, resolved ahead of query time at zero LLM cost; (c) provenance scoping as an attribution constraint with multi-tier named-reference routing; and (d) two-tier context with model-triggered verbatim hydration. Across four ablations, a 2B model reaches parity with a 35B model on factual integrity (exact values in all runs; zero confabulated numbers on absent-entity traps); structured retrieval beats flat RAG by +11.4 points at 2B; skeleton-only context preserves quantitative answers at 20-30% smaller prompts; and hydration recovers verbatim narrative in ~8s versus ~29s. Two properties matter for regulated domains: each query resolves in a single generation call, and every reported value is traceable to its exact source and position by construction.