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Towards More Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Evaluating RAG Under Adversarial Poisoning Attacks

21 Dec 2024arXiv:2412.16708archive 2025-07-28

Jinyan Su, Jin Peng Zhou, Zhengxin Zhang, Preslav Nakov, Claire Cardie

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have emerged as a promising solution to mitigate LLM hallucinations and enhance their performance in knowledge-intensive domains. However, these systems are vulnerable to adversarial poisoning attacks, where malicious passages injected into retrieval databases can mislead the model into generating factually incorrect outputs. In this paper, we investigate both the retrieval and the generation components of RAG systems to understand how to enhance their robustness against such attacks. From the retrieval perspective, we analyze why and how the adversarial contexts are retrieved and assess how the quality of the retrieved passages impacts downstream generation. From a generation perspective, we evaluate whether LLMs' advanced critical thinking and internal knowledge capabilities can be leveraged to mitigate the impact of adversarial contexts, i.e., using skeptical prompting as a self-defense mechanism. Our experiments and findings provide actionable insights into designing safer and more resilient retrieval-augmented frameworks, paving the way for their reliable deployment in real-world applications.

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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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