JOIN (Jurnal Online Informatika)
Vol 11 No 1 (2026)

Evaluating RAG Performance on Small Language Models for Low-Resource Devices through Chunking and Retrieval Methods

Agustiani, Amelia Dewi (Unknown)
Putri, Salsabila Maharani (Unknown)
Hutahaean, Jonner (Unknown)
Sholahuddin, Muhammad Rizqi (Unknown)
Alifi, Muhammad Riza (Unknown)
Hodijah, Ade (Unknown)



Article Info

Publish Date
14 May 2026

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) combines generative capabilities of language models with external document retrieval to answer questions grounded in reference texts. However, deploying RAG on low-resource devices like Android smartphones is challenging because SLMs have limited computational capacity and depend heavily on efficient chunking and retrieval. Although interest in on-device processing is growing, research on RAG configurations for SLMs under strict resource constraints especially for domain-specific tasks remains limited. This study therefore investigates which combinations of chunking technique, chunk size, overlap, and retrieval strategy best balance accuracy and speed on low-resource devices. The evaluation uses 148 Indonesian questions sourced from an official Hajj guidebook. The study consists of two phases retrieval and generation. Retrieval is evaluated using BLEU, ROUGE-L, MRR, MAP, and Hit@k, while answer quality is measured with BERTScore. The experiments compare different chunking methods (fixed-size or semantic), chunk sizes (128 or 256 tokens), overlaps (25, 50 and 100 tokens), and retrieval methods (dense, sparse, or hybrid). Results show that sparse retrieval with 256-token chunks and 100-token overlap yields the best answer quality (F1 = 0.726). However, 128-token chunks with the same overlap provide the fastest generation time (69.737 seconds). The main contribution of this study is a systematic evaluation of RAG configurations for fully on-device SLMs using a domain-specific Hajj and Umrah dataset not explored in prior research. The findings provide practical guidance for designing efficient and accurate RAG-based question-answering systems on low-resource devices.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

join

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

JOIN (Jurnal Online Informatika) is a scientific journal published by the Department of Informatics UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung. This journal contains scientific papers from Academics, Researchers, and Practitioners about research on informatics. JOIN (Jurnal Online Informatika) is published ...