Failure Modes in Retrieval-Augmented QA
Ablation-driven investigation of where RAG pipelines break under noisy corpora.
2026-02-01
Problem
RAG answers degrade sharply when corpora include contradictory or stale documents.
Hypothesis
Context filtering before generation reduces hallucination and contradiction rates.
Method
Evaluated three filtering strategies across noisy benchmark splits.
Results
Contradiction rate dropped by 17% with confidence-based context filtering.
Future Work
Add online calibration to adapt filtering thresholds by topic cluster.