Papers › RAG-QA Arena: Evaluating Domain Robustness for Long-form Retrieval Augmented Question Answering

RAG-QA Arena: Evaluating Domain Robustness for Long-form Retrieval Augmented Question Answering

19 Jul 2024arXiv:2407.13998archive 2025-07-28

Rujun Han, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Jenyuan Wang, Lan Liu, William Yang Wang, Bonan Min, Vittorio Castelli

Question answering based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG-QA) is an important research topic in NLP and has a wide range of real-world applications. However, most existing datasets for this task are either constructed using a single source corpus or consist of short extractive answers, which fall short of evaluating large language model (LLM) based RAG-QA systems on cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we create Long-form RobustQA (LFRQA), a new dataset comprising human-written long-form answers that integrate short extractive answers from multiple documents into a single, coherent narrative, covering 26K queries and large corpora across seven different domains. We further propose RAG-QA Arena by directly comparing model-generated answers against LFRQA's answers using LLMs as evaluators. We show via extensive experiments that RAG-QA Arena and human judgments on answer quality are highly correlated. Moreover, only 41.3% of the most competitive LLM's answers are preferred to LFRQA's answers, demonstrating RAG-QA Arena as a challenging evaluation platform for future research.

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