The paper introduces a method for determining whether retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have sufficient, insufficient, or conflicting evidence to answer a question. By training a lightweight linear classifier on hidden activations and attention-derived features from 16 language models, the authors demonstrate that these internal signals reliably predict the adequacy of retrieved documents, outperforming prompting-based baselines and specialized RAG models. Analysis shows that middle-layer hidden states carry the most informative signals for this triage task.
arXiv:2609.37469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external sources, but retrieved passages often name the right entities without...
arXiv:2606. 29090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard way to ground large language models in external knowledge, yet most systems retrieve a fixed number of passages for every question regardless of its difficulty.
arXiv:2606. 00432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems scale, it becomes increasingly challenging to ensure faithful grounding in external evidence.
The paper introduces RAG‑Stress, a diagnostic protocol that tests how retrieval‑augmented generation models handle misleading evidence. By fixing the question and reference answer, editing a single assertion to support an incorrect answer, and varying source‑priority policies and evidence positions, the study measures misleading rate (MR) and clean accuracy across fifteen systems on multiple QA datasets. Results show that prioritizing documents increases MR by 10.9–13.5 percentage points, with the highest MR when the misleading span appears at the end of the evidence.
The paper investigates whether incorporating an evidence-support signal into retrieval evaluation for retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) improves downstream decision‑making. Across multiple benchmarks and a TREC RAG 2025 setting, the evidence signal alters retriever rankings but its benefits vary: it does not consistently enhance retriever training, its usefulness for system selection depends on generator instructions, and it does not reliably predict answer quality on unseen topics. Human filtering of evidence‑rich passages preserves useful content, yet evaluators disagree on whether this improves final answers, indicating that evidence‑aware evaluation alone does not guarantee better downstream outcomes.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard way to ground large language models in external knowledge, yet most systems retrieve a fixed number of passages for every question regardless of its difficulty. This wastes computation on easy questions, starves hard ones, and gives no signal for when a generated answer can be trusted.
The paper evaluates how robust large language models (LLMs) are when using retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) in practical settings. It investigates whether RAG always outperforms non‑RAG approaches, whether adding more retrieved documents helps, and whether the order of documents matters, using a benchmark of 1,891 samples across five datasets and three task categories. Experiments with 11 LLMs show generally high retrieval robustness, but performance varies by task and prompting strategy, indicating that adopting RAG should be considered on a case‑by‑case basis.
arXiv:2509.20377v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) on knowledge-intensive tasks...
The paper investigates where and how large language models encode signals that indicate answer correctness. By examining hidden states, token probabilities, residual-stream features, attention, and their combinations, the authors find that correctness signals are concentrated in the answer span and that different signal families complement each other. Fusing these signals improves robustness, especially under distribution shifts, and can be used to control retrieval in downstream tasks.
The paper introduces INTRA, an attention-based encoder-decoder framework that retrieves directly from its own internal representations instead of using an external retriever. By having decoder attention query pre-encoded evidence chunks, INTRA unifies retrieval and generation, eliminating the typical mismatch seen in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. Experiments on question-answering benchmarks show that INTRA outperforms strong engineered retrieval pipelines in both evidence recall and overall answer quality.
arXiv:2512. 11614v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on retrieved context to guide large language models (LLM), yet treats the retrieval as a heuristic rather than verifiable evidence -- leading to unsupported answers, hallucinations, and reliance on spurious context.
arXiv:2609.22162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves the factuality of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by grounding generatio...