When Confidence Takes the Wrong Path: Diagnosing Retrieval-State Lock-In in RAG
The trustworthiness of a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system depends on more than the answer it returns, yet many black-box uncertainty methods still read agreement among sampled answers as confidence. That inference fails when repeated samples condition on the same defective retrieval state. The state may be empty, with the model falling back on parametric memory, or populated by a coherent but wrong neighbourhood. In either case, the answers agree because the error is stable. The problem is recognised in deployed RAG, but it has lacked a name, a measurable signature, and a prevalence bound. We supply all three. We name the failure retrieval-state lock-in and diagnose it by separ...
| Authors | Sahib Julka |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 22 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 June 2026 |
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