The Retrieval Bottleneck: Scaling Laws for Reinforcement Learning in RAG

Scaling laws have enabled predictable compute allocation for pre-training and for RL in reasoning tasks. However, research on retrieval reinforcement generation (RAG) remains insufficient and there is a lack of fundamental understanding of the interaction between retrieval quality and reinforcement learning computation. We present the first systematic study of RL scaling for RAG across three knowledge-intensive benchmarks. We introduce the Retrieval Bottleneck Hypothesis and derive sig-moidal scaling laws showing that retrieval quality, not RL compute, determines the asymptotic performance ceiling. Our analysis reveals three principles: (1) retrieval quality bounds achievable performance, with improving retrieval yielding larger gains than algorithmic innovations; (2) design choices (training objectives, rewards, off-policy methods) primarily modulate compute efficiency, with secondary effects on the ceiling that are substantially smaller than retrieval quality improvements; and (3) stable configurations enable extrapolation with 3.1% error at 4 × compute. We further uncover RAG-specific dynamics: optimal document count increases with training, and RL algorithm effectiveness depends critically on retrieval quality. These insights yield RAG-S CALE RL, achieving strong performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks while providing the predictable scaling long available for pre-training but previously absent in RAG-RL.