Loop Engineering for Hierarchical Retrieval: Reading a Long Document by Its Table of Contents

This article introduces a technique called 'Loop Engineering for Hierarchical Retrieval' that uses a document's table of contents to efficiently navigate and retrieve information from long documents. By routing retrieval through the TOC in a bounded loop, the method reduces token usage and improves precision compared to traditional top-k retrieval over all pages. The approach is particularly useful for enterprise document intelligence tasks involving very large documents.