arXiv AI
Aug 28

Why RAGs Hallucinate: Penalty-Aware Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems with Knowledge-Gap Canaries

The paper introduces a penalty‑aware evaluation framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that uses asymmetric scoring, knowledge‑gap canaries, and a failure‑attribution pipeline. Applying this framework to three commercial RAG products and a baseline on SimpleQA‑Verified, the authors find that while overall accuracy is similar across systems, canary violation rates vary dramatically, showing that systems differ more in when they answer than in what they answer. The study demonstrates that penalty‑aware scoring can reorder system rankings and is robust across different penalty settings.

By Alden Do Rosario, Hussein Younes, Felipe Pires
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Check The Scoreboard: An Analysis of Scoring Schemes on Multiple-Choice Evaluation

The paper investigates how different scoring schemes affect the evaluation of multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) models. It introduces six education-inspired scoring methods that assess abilities such as distractor elimination, abstention, confidence calibration, and self-correction. Experiments on large language models show that these alternative schemes can change model rankings, better predict user preferences, and reveal distinct capabilities compared to traditional accuracy scoring.

By Nishant Balepur, Paiheng Xu, Wei Ai, Eunsol Choi, Rachel Rudinger, Jordan Boyd-Graber
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Grading Needs a Rubric, Not Intelligence

Small language models can grade open‑ended exam answers as reliably as much larger models when they use an explicit rubric. In experiments with six cost‑efficient model configurations, the rubric decouples grading from judge intelligence, with answer identity explaining 95.6% of score variance and judge identity only 0.2%. Removing rubric criteria or the official answer collapses reliability and inflates scores, showing the rubric’s essential role.

By Jhen-Ke Lin