When does HyDE hurt retrieval, and what variants fix its failure modes?

HyDE generates a fake answer to embed, which helps on vague queries but actively hurts on factual or out-of-domain ones. The signal is naming exactly when the hypothetical document misleads retrieval and which multi-draft and hybrid variants recover.

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Next in this trackHow do you build RAG over a SQL database (text-to-SQL) when the answer lives in rows, not documents?Next in this trackHow do you build RAG over a large code repository so an agent can answer questions and edit code?Next in this trackHow do you do incremental indexing for a RAG system with constant document churn, without a nightly full rebuild?

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