Chunk Coverage (CC), an oracle-independent test adequacy criterion for testing the retrieval component of RAG systems, is introduced and results show that CC captures retrieval diversity relevant to effective testing without requiring test oracles.
Abstract
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based systems\footnote{For brevity, RAG-based systems are referred to as RAG systems throughout this paper.} are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where correct behaviour depends not only on the language model but also on the retrieval component that selects external documents at inference time. While existing RAG evaluation metrics assess retrieval and generation quality on a per-query basis, typically relying on query-level test oracles such as reference answers or relevance annotations, they provide limited insight into whether a test suite adequately exercises the retrieval behaviour of the system as a whole. In this paper, we introduce Chunk Coverage (CC), an oracle-independent test adequacy criterion for testing the retrieval component of RAG systems. CC measures the fraction of corpus chunks that are retrieved at least once across a test suite, providing a structural view of which parts of the retrieval space have been exercised. We further show how CC can be used to guide test selection and generation by prioritising queries that expand coverage of previously unexercised retrieval regions. We evaluate CC on clinical and financial RAG system scenarios. CC-guided testing reaches 50% of attainable coverage 1.7x faster than random selection and 4.2x faster than redundancy-biased strategies. Moreover, CC improves fault detection effectiveness (APFD) by 10% to 25% over random, indicating earlier discovery of distinct retrieval faults. These results show that CC captures retrieval diversity relevant to effective testing without requiring test oracles.
This work conducts an empirical study of how irrelevant retrieved passages affect downstream generation, and proposes a lightweight, context-size classification module that dynamically predicts how much context is required based on query-specific needs.
Maya Iratni, M. Boughanem, T. Dkaki· Annual International ACM SIG...· 0 citations
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to use external and domain-specific knowledge, but its reliability depends on the interaction between the generative model, embedding model, retrieval mechanism, and prompt construction strategy. We present RagTester, an automated end-to-end testing approach for RAG systems. RagTester generates retrieval documents, test inputs, and expected outputs; executes the tests; and evaluates the resulting answers using an LLM as a judge. Its test-generation strategy targets complex passages, unsupported queries, and document-coverage criteria. We evaluate RagTester using eight LLMs and six embedding models, yielding 24 compatible configurations, and compare it with a baseline test-input generator. Across 72,000 test executions, RagTester detected 21,633 failures, 6.6% more than the baseline, and outperformed it in 20 of the 24 configurations. The detected failures include inaccurate retrieval, unsupported answers, incomplete use of retrieved context, and difficulties interpreting complex passages. These results show that coverage-oriented test generation can effectively expose failures caused by the interaction between retrieval and generation components and support the assessment of RAG configurations before deployment.
Ange Maiztegi, J. Ayerdi, Miren Illarramendi et al.· 0 citations
The idea of context is no longer considered secondary in the construction of language-model systems. With the use of local Retrieval-Augmented Generation, even a tiny modification of the prompt or the context might produce another set of retrievals, citations, and ultimately different answers; however, in practice, tests are often performed with only one version of the question. In this work, we suggest a local context-engineering framework for exploring perturbation robustness, reproducibility, and budgetfriendly assessment in one unified pipeline. Local RAG is built on several small teaching packs for the models; perturbations are introduced to the queries, each experiment is recorded in capsule format, and a gate mechanism based on the decision tree is used to judge if the whole perturbation suite can be skipped, minimized, or run. As a result, the augmented capsule-derived data set contains 3,570 perturbation rows, out of which 2,619 labeled rows are used for retraining. In this labeled subset, BLEU scores are available in 446 cases, answer perplexity and semanticjudgment scores are available in 1,668 cases, citation overlap is available for all rows, and retrieval overlap is available for 2,099 rows. The final decision tree obtains 0.915 ROC-AUC, 0.891 PR-AUC, 0.913 accuracy, 0.863 F1 score, and expected savings of 76.5% on the held-out augmented test split. A more conservative threshold setting lowers the stable-risk value from 0.084 to 0.062, while reducing expected savings to 57.4%. Thus, we provide a local study pipeline to examine the effect of perturbations on answer stability, contradictions, robustness, and budget-friendly evaluation.
Rahul Reddy Gangapuram, William B. Andreopoulos· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves language-model answers by retrieving external evidence before generation. However, its reliability depends on the retrieved context. In real settings, passages can be irrelevant, incomplete, conflicting, or poorly ordered. These problems may reduce accuracy and explainability. This study tests how retrieval noise affects RAG and whether reranking, citation-aware generation, and lightweight verification can improve system behaviour. A controlled experiment was conducted on a small HotpotQA subset using BM25, Sentence-BERT, and FAISS. Four systems were compared: vanilla RAG, reranking-only, citation-only, and a full enhanced system. Results show that reranking achieved the highest average noisy F1, but the gain over vanilla RAG was small. The full enhanced system achieved better faithfulness, groundedness, and citation precision, but did not improve average noisy F1. This suggests that robust and explainable RAG is a multi-objective problem.
Shirui Chen· Advances in Engineering Inno...· 0 citations
Results align with a diagnostic perspective on chunking: using evidence at a task-appropriate level of granularity can improve grounding, auditability, and answer quality, but the observed patterns should be interpreted within the HotpotQA distractor setting, fixed generator, and tested context budgets.