arXiv AI

A Hierarchical Consistency Framework for Auditing Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

arXiv AI
Oct 9

RAG-Stress: Probing the Limits of Evidence Reliance in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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.

By Shunyuan Zhou, Hao Chen, Tianyu Wang, Goose Lin, Zaiyuan Wang, Haiying Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 21

The Bottleneck Is Retrieval, Not Reading: Diagnosing Evidence-Based Generation with RAG for Long Context Question Answering

arXiv:2610.26951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the dominant paradigm for grounding large language models in external corpora, but its similarity-driven, chunk...

By Debopriyo Banerjee, Owais Aijaz, Ahmer Tabassum, Zhuohan Xie, Preslav Nakov, Veselin Stoyanov
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

ReliableRAG: Combating Misinformation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Reliability-Guided Reasoning Chains

ReliableRAG is a new framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation that tackles misinformation in multi‑hop question answering. It extracts structured triples from retrieved documents, evaluates each triple’s reliability by combining semantic relevance to the query with credibility, and keeps only the top‑K reliable, non‑redundant triples. Using these refined triples, the system builds robust reasoning chains that filter out deceptive misinformation and produce accurate, trustworthy answers.

By Jinpu Jiang, Xuan Wu, Wenhao Song, Bo Yang, You Zhou, Hongwei Ge, Heow Pueh Lee, Yanchun Liang, Chunguo Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Assessing the Downstream Utility of Evidence-Aware Retrieval in RAG

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.

By Utshab Kumar Ghosh, Debayan Mukhopadhyay, Shubham Chatterjee
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Parameters vs. Context: TRACE Fine-Tuning for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces TRACE, a fine‑tuning framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) that addresses conflicts between retrieved knowledge and a model’s internal knowledge. TRACE uses multi‑agent debate traces to identify correct and incorrect candidates and answer‑shift patterns, providing fine‑grained supervision for reliable knowledge‑source selection. It also incorporates an answer‑completeness regularization mechanism to prevent empty, overly short, or prematurely terminated responses, thereby improving robustness against misleading retrieved content and enhancing answer quality.

By Zhengchen Huang, Yundong Sun, Minrui Song, Shuanglong Yao, Ye Liu, Ji Chen, Xing Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

EAR: Entity-Aware Partitioning Approach for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Development

The paper introduces EAR, an Entity‑Aware Partitioning approach that improves retrieval‑augmented generation for multiple‑choice question answering by extracting normalized surface anchors from questions, answers, and the corpus. EAR retrieves local windows around matching anchors and can attach a larger parent passage via an extractive summary, reducing retrieved words by 37.5‑40.2% compared to fixed‑size chunks. Experiments on a cleaned MMLU‑style subset with Mistral, Gemma, and DeepSeek show modest accuracy changes, none statistically significant, highlighting EAR’s methodological contribution of compact, inspectable retrieval units.

By Cenab Batu Bora, Oylum Alatl{\i}, Sebnem Bora, Oguz Dikenelli