ZeroRAG: Decentralized Semantic Routing for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
ZeroRAG is a decentralized routing layer for RAG that enables document retrieval across a peer-to-peer overlay without centralized orchestration or global data structures. Each peer maintains only lightweight local state, and queries are steered via a best-first walk that progressively rewires the network toward semantically relevant neighbors. Evaluations on real-world workloads show it outperforms decentralized baselines in recall and message efficiency, approaches centralized performance, self-heals after failures, and scales to 100,000 peers.
Why it matters: This paper presents a novel decentralized approach to RAG that addresses privacy and custody constraints, with strong scalability and resilience results, offering a practical alternative to centralized retrieval.