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 AI
Oct 5

Evaluating the Retrieval Robustness of Large Language Models

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.

By Shuyang Cao, Karthik Radhakrishnan, David Rosenberg, Steven Lu, Pengxiang Cheng, Lu Wang, Shiyue Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 30

XRAG: eXamining the Core -- Benchmarking Foundational Components in Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2412. 15529v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) synergizes the retrieval of pertinent data with the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring that the generated output is not only contextually relevant but also accurate and current.

By Qili Zhang, Qianren Mao, Yangyifei Luo, Yashuo Luo, Hanwen Hao, Zhilong Cao, Weifeng Jiang, Zhijun Chen, Junnan Liu, Feng Yan, Xiaolong Wang, Jinlong Zhang, Zhenting Huang, Zhixing Tan, Jie Sun, Bo Li, Jianxin Li, Philip S. Yu