  We present an alternative, memory-efficient, Schmidt decomposition-based
description of the inherently bipartite restricted active space (RAS) scheme,
which can be implemented effortlessly within the density matrix renormalization
group (DMRG) method via the dynamically extended active space procedure.
Benchmark calculations are compared against state-of-the-art results of C$_2$
and Cr$_2$, which are notorious for their multi-reference character. Our
results for ground and excited states together with spectroscopic constants
demonstrate that the proposed novel approach, dubbed as DMRG-RAS, which is
variational and free of uncontrolled method errors, has the potential to
outperfom conventional methods for strongly correlated molecules.
