redhop 0.2.2

Reasoning-aware context runtime for RAG — chunk, retrieve, and allocate the document context an LLM should see, with citations and a Decision Report. In-process, no vector DB.

RedHop

A reasoning-preserving context runtime for RAG.

Hand it a document and a question. RedHop chunks, retrieves, and allocates the context your model should actually see — then tells you what it kept, what it dropped, and why, with citations back to the source. No vector database, no LLM, all in-process.

import redhop

doc = redhop.Document.from_file("contract.pdf")
ctx = doc.context("What is the governing law?")

answer = llm.generate(ctx.text())   # any LLM provider — no lock-in

pip install redhop

One self-contained wheel — no Python dependencies. The default lexical tier needs no model at all; the semantic/rerank tiers download a small model on first use (cached).

How it compares

Measured on identical documents + budgets + BM25 retrieval, RedHop beats LangChain on multi-hop evidence retention (77% vs 71%) and ties LlamaIndex on contracts (82% vs 86%, while beating LangChain at 73%) — without a vector database, an agent framework, or model finetuning.

Methodology + raw runs: FRAMEWORK_COMPARISON.md · framework_comparison.txt.

How it works

Five stages: you bring documents and a query, RedHop owns parsing, chunking, retrieval, and context allocation, and you get a BuiltContext with the assembled prompt, citations, and a Decision Report. Each stage has an evidence-backed default that traces to a finding in docs/findings/.

The idea

Retrieval quality is not the same as reasoning quality. Transformers tolerate irrelevant context far better than they tolerate missing reasoning links — so the chunk a multi-hop answer depends on is often low-relevance to the query and gets silently pruned. RedHop's default keeps it, and makes the trade-off visible. It is not a retriever, vector database, agent framework, or workflow engine — it does one thing: turn a document and a query into the right prompt context, and explain the decision.

It explains every decision

Every call returns a Decision Report — what it kept, what it dropped, and why, including when it deliberately leaves a small context untouched.

Read the fields directly via ctx.report.auto_decision, total_tokens, retained_evidence_ratio, or call doc.analyze(query) for the report without assembling a context.

Cite the evidence

Every selected chunk remembers where it came from:

for c in ctx.citations:
    print(c["source"], c["page"], c["heading"])
    # contract.pdf  3     None      ->  "contract.pdf, p.3"
    # notes.md      None  "Refunds" ->  "notes.md -> Refunds"

Loading documents

On-ramp	For
Document.from_text(text, source="document")	text you already have
Document.from_chunks([...])	content you already chunked
Document.from_file("x.pdf")	a file — PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, Markdown, or text/code
Document.from_bytes(data, source="x.pdf")	bytes you fetched (S3 / GCS / HTTP / DB)
Document.from_folder("./docs", persist=True)	a whole directory, with an optional incremental on-disk index

Retrieval tiers — no vector database

Start at the lexical default — it handles most document QA because the words in the question are usually the words in the answer — and climb only when the failure shape calls for it. All in-process, no ANN, no index server.

# Default — most docs (code, API refs, runbooks, financial reports, handbooks)
doc = redhop.Document.from_file("contract.pdf")
ctx = doc.context("What is the governing law?")

# Structured docs with parallel clauses (regional overrides, per-region sub-sections):
doc = redhop.Document.from_file("msa.pdf", retrieval="hybrid", model="bge-small")
ctx = doc.context("What law applies in the UK?", include_heading=True, neighbors=1)

# Synonym-mismatch corpora (HR FAQs, support tickets where users phrase
# things very differently from the docs). Cross-encoder adds 5–10× latency
# — verify it helps on your corpus before enabling.
doc = redhop.Document.from_file("support.md",
    retrieval="hybrid", model="bge-small", rerank="cross-encoder")

The 60-second decision guide with trade-offs and query-writing tips: CHOOSING_A_CONFIG.

Non-English content

Default is English Snowball. Swap with the language= kwarg — any of the 18 Snowball Porter2 languages (arabic, danish, dutch, english, finnish, french, german, greek, hungarian, italian, norwegian, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish, swedish, tamil, turkish):

doc = redhop.Document.from_text(german_text, language="german")
# Now `Buch` finds chunks containing `Bücher` (and vice versa)

One analyzer drives both BM25 retrieval AND the grounding scorer, so they can't drift on what "the same term" means. Unknown names raise (we don't silently fall back to English). See the language guide for the full breakdown and the calibration disclaimer (we ship the stemmers; eval-corpus ranking quality on a real domain corpus is the user's call).

Assembly strategies

strategy=	What it does
reasoning_preserving (default)	keep query-relevant seeds and rescue low-relevance chunks linked to one; drop only unlinked junk
distractor_filtered	drop everything below a query-grounding bar
max_density	greedily pack the densest chunks into the budget
raw_topk	keep retrieval order until the budget fills
auto	size-gated: pass small contexts through, prune large/diluted ones

Already have chunks from your own retriever? Use redhop.build_context(query, retrieved_chunks=chunks, ...) for the low-level surface.

Documentation

Full docs, the comparison vs LangChain / LlamaIndex, and the evidence behind every default: https://www.redhopai.com

Apache-2.0. Also available for Node.js (npm install redhop) and Rust (cargo add redhop).