Papers › A Reality Check on Context Utilisation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

A Reality Check on Context Utilisation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

22 Dec 2024arXiv:2412.17031archive 2025-07-28

Lovisa Hagström, Sara Vera Marjanović, Haeun Yu, Arnav Arora, Christina Lioma, Maria Maistro, Pepa Atanasova, Isabelle Augenstein

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps address the limitations of the parametric knowledge embedded within a language model (LM). However, investigations of how LMs utilise retrieved information of varying complexity in real-world scenarios have been limited to synthetic contexts. We introduce DRUID (Dataset of Retrieved Unreliable, Insufficient and Difficult-to-understand contexts) with real-world queries and contexts manually annotated for stance. The dataset is based on the prototypical task of automated claim verification, for which automated retrieval of real-world evidence is crucial. We compare DRUID to synthetic datasets (CounterFact, ConflictQA) and find that artificial datasets often fail to represent the complex and diverse real-world context settings. We show that synthetic datasets exaggerate context characteristics rare in real retrieved data, which leads to inflated context utilisation results, as measured by our novel ACU score. Moreover, while previous work has mainly focused on singleton context characteristics to explain context utilisation, correlations between singleton context properties and ACU on DRUID are surprisingly small compared to other properties related to context source. Overall, our work underscores the need for real-world aligned context utilisation studies to represent and improve performance in real-world RAG settings.

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Tasks

Claim Verification Language Modeling Language Modelling RAG Retrieval Retrieval-augmented Generation

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Adam Attention Attention Dropout BART BERT BPE Dense Connections Dropout Layer Normalization Linear Layer Linear Warmup With Linear Decay Multi-Head Attention RAG Residual Connection Softmax Weight Decay WordPiece

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