The paper introduces "stale‑document poisoning," a temporal alignment failure where outdated retrieval evidence causes retrieval‑augmented generation models to produce incorrect answers even when the model could answer correctly without retrieval. A benchmark of 317 verified knowledge reversals across medicine, law, software, and platform policy shows that outdated evidence flips 30–37% of Llama and Qwen answers, rising to 66–75% when models are explicitly instructed to trust the document. The study demonstrates that providing explicit validity information and a recency‑aware re‑ranker can substantially reduce poisoning, highlighting the need for models to assess whether retrieved evidence remains applicable.
arXiv:2607. 09349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation evaluation checks whether model claims are factually grounded in retrieved documents.
arXiv:2608.29307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models increasingly answer questions by consulting retrieved documents rather than memory alone, a design now common in search assistants an...
arXiv:2609.09243v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds a language model in retrieved documents, which reduces hallucination but creates a new attack surface: i...
arXiv:2609.24101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated biomedical evidence synthesis depends on retrieving published studies, but the biomedical literature is systematically skewed toward positive...
Automated biomedical evidence synthesis depends on retrieving published studies, but the biomedical literature is systematically skewed toward positive findings. Deeper retrieval can therefore make a...
The paper investigates why retrieval‑based open‑ended evaluation fails in medical fact verification. By creating two detailed taxonomies—one for retrieval‑stage errors across five quality dimensions and another for verifier‑reasoning errors across six steps—the authors automatically label evidence quality and reasoning errors using an LLM‑as‑Judge pipeline. Their large‑scale stress tests across multiple retrieval methods and verifier models show that increasing model size, reasoning effort, source breadth, or medical fine‑tuning does not eliminate these failure modes, indicating fundamental limits of the retrieve‑then‑verify paradigm in open‑ended medical contexts.
The paper investigates how memory systems can answer a current query correctly yet fail to retain distinctions needed for later updates. Using a paired‑history audit, the authors evaluate 24 history pairs across six synthetic mechanisms and two model backends, achieving perfect reveal accuracy on DeepSeek and high accuracy on GLM. Record‑level audits reveal specific failures in structured reveal memories and frontier late‑reference adequacy, and the authors test a label‑equivariant repair that only partially restores correctness.
arXiv:2605. 14473v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is usually evaluated by whether the final answer is correct.
arXiv:2608. 09393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We identify and quantify temporal misgrounding: the systematic retrieval and citation of the currently in-force version of a legal article when the applicable version is an earlier or future one.
arXiv:2608. 08512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evolving documents, such as laws, tax codes, and software documentation, are amended, replaced, and sometimes reverted over time, so a question has different correct answers at different dates.
The paper investigates when it is better to return an existing draft answer or revise it using retrieved evidence in retrieval‑augmented QA systems. By grading both the draft and its candidate revision with the same correctness judge, the authors define a paired effect called recoverability and train policies to predict it before revision. Experiments on 25,870 open‑domain questions show that a recoverability‑based scorer outperforms a draft‑correctness scorer across multiple Llama setups, improving accuracy–revision trade‑offs and closing a significant portion of the oracle gap, though it still applies harmful revisions in a substantial fraction of cases.
The paper introduces ToxicBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate how tool‑augmented data agents handle incorrect tool outputs. By pairing clean and poisoned observations across numerical, label, schema, and retrieval errors, the authors assess both the checking process and the final answer adoption. In a 118‑task GPT evaluation, poisoning reduces task success by 26–39 percentage points, revealing that repeated poisoning leads to wrong-answer adoption even after checking, while ordinary retries help only under one‑shot poisoning. Human annotations on 200 trajectories confirm the scoring system’s reliability, showing 96% agreement with task success and supporting the benefits of retries and audit‑based adoption.