Papers › Out of Style: RAG's Fragility to Linguistic Variation

Out of Style: RAG's Fragility to Linguistic Variation

11 Apr 2025arXiv:2504.08231archive 2025-07-28

Tianyu Cao, Neel Bhandari, Akhila Yerukola, Akari Asai, Maarten Sap

Despite the impressive performance of Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) systems across various NLP benchmarks, their robustness in handling real-world user-LLM interaction queries remains largely underexplored. This presents a critical gap for practical deployment, where user queries exhibit greater linguistic variations and can trigger cascading errors across interdependent RAG components. In this work, we systematically analyze how varying four linguistic dimensions (formality, readability, politeness, and grammatical correctness) impact RAG performance. We evaluate two retrieval models and nine LLMs, ranging from 3 to 72 billion parameters, across four information-seeking Question Answering (QA) datasets. Our results reveal that linguistic reformulations significantly impact both retrieval and generation stages, leading to a relative performance drop of up to 40.41% in Recall@5 scores for less formal queries and 38.86% in answer match scores for queries containing grammatical errors. Notably, RAG systems exhibit greater sensitivity to such variations compared to LLM-only generations, highlighting their vulnerability to error propagation due to linguistic shifts. These findings highlight the need for improved robustness techniques to enhance reliability in diverse user interactions.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

14 samples harvested; 11 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 3 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-25; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 14 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from springcty/rag-fragility-to-linguistic-variation. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections