Question
Separate a retrieval failure from an answer-generation failure
An excellent writer cannot quote the paragraph it never received.
When it fits
- A document-grounded assistant gives a wrong answer and the team immediately starts rewriting the prompt.
When to avoid it
- Faithfulness to a wrong source is still wrong. Automated evaluation scores need checking and should not replace source-version verification.
A question to ask
Was the necessary information present in the approved source collection? · Did retrieval supply that information with the right version and scope? · Does the answer accurately use the supplied evidence and answer the question?
Why it matters
Inspect the question, retrieved passages and answer as separate artifacts. Determine whether the needed evidence was available, retrieved and used correctly. Also check whether the answer addresses the actual question. These are different failure locations and may need different repairs.
An example
The current procedure is in the library, but retrieval returns an obsolete version. A more forceful writing prompt is not the first repair.
Check your result
The defect is assigned to a supported failure location with the relevant artifacts attached.
Keep this limit in mind
- Faithfulness to a wrong source is still wrong. Automated evaluation scores need checking and should not replace source-version verification.
Connected ideas
Useful withGive the second check evidence the first answer did not create
Evidence and sources
Ragas separates faithfulness to retrieved context, answer relevance and context relevance instead of treating response quality as a single property.
Faithfulness to an incorrect source is not factual truth, and automated estimates can misclassify errors.
Ragas: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation · Evaluation framework