@inproceedings{afzal-etal-2026-beyond-grid,
    title = "Beyond Grid Search: Leveraging {B}ayesian Optimization for Accelerating {RAG} Pipeline Optimization",
    author = "Afzal, Anum  and
      Zheng, Xueru  and
      Matthes, Florian",
    editor = {Matusevych, Yevgen  and
      Eryi{\u{g}}it, G{\"u}l{\c{s}}en  and
      Aletras, Nikolaos},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.19/",
    pages = "263--277",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-384-5",
    abstract = "Finding optimal configurations for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines via grid search is computationally prohibitive, limiting real-world scalability. We investigate Bayesian Optimization (BO) as an efficient alternative, systematically comparing seven BO strategies combining four surrogate models and two multi-fidelity methods across FiQA, SciFact, and HotpotQA datasets. Our framework explores both global pipeline and local component-wise optimization, targeting final RAG performance and resource efficiency. Our results show that BO reduces optimization time by up to 84{\%} compared to grid search while maintaining comparable accuracy, with local optimization offering the most practical balance for deployment. Notably, performance gains plateau with larger evaluation budgets, suggesting that moderate resource investments suffice for effective RAG tuning. We provide actionable guidelines that empower industry practitioners to efficiently configure and deploy high-performing RAG systems under real-world constraints."
}