Rethinking Retrieval in the Long-Context Era: Training-Free Semantic Trees for Adaptive Context Construction

Long-context language models can increasingly process entire documents, making full-context prompting a practical alternative to passage retrieval. However, greater capacity determines how much information a model can receive, but not which information best supports a query. This distinction motivates rethinking retrieval: when the full document already fits, can selecting and organizing its evidence improve answering? The challenge is to retain supporting facts and relations while keeping the context focused on the question. To reconcile these goals, we introduce TreeFuse, a training-free framework that uses semantic abstraction to guide selection while retaining original text for answering. TreeFuse constructs a reusable semantic hierarchy from the full document in a single generation, linking node descriptions to source spans. Given a query, structural–semantic scoring and fine-grained lexical attribution nominate shared source nodes; their union with ancestor context preserves structural relations and complete local text. Across four frontier answer models, TreeFuse improves average QA-F1 by 1.72 points over full-context prompting on three LongBench tasks, surpassing the evaluated baselines on the four-model average while reducing answer-context length by 58.55%. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/treefuse-ECFE.