arXiv Computation and Language By Abhinav Havaldar, Enrico Santus

When RAG Fails to Equalize: Geo-bias in Factual Question Answering over Public Companies

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The paper investigates whether retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) can uniformly correct factual errors in large language models (LLMs) by testing six LLMs on a benchmark of about 2,000 public companies. In a controlled factual QA setting, the authors evaluate the models under four conditions—no‑context, perfect context, misleading context, and distraction context—across four atomic attributes. Results show significant geographic disparities in baseline accuracy, and while perfect context improves performance, it does not eliminate these gaps; misleading context often leads models to copy incorrect information, and larger models only marginally reduce structural biases.

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