What Would Fix This RAG Failure? Auditing Counterfactual Response with Paired Evidence Interventions
A failed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) answer can be consistent with several unseen responses to evidence repair. We introduce Pair-ID, an offline audit that holds one query, retrieval state, and reader constant, then crosses two operations, adding missing support and deleting verified nonsupport, to measure a same-failure counterfactual response vector. A complete funnel over 19,981 benchmark queries identifies 11,105 eligible Qwen failures, from which a prospectively fixed SHA-256 ordering selects 1,200 before generating any sampled response. Among 1,190 regenerated-valid failures, support addition repairs 197/600 JOINT cases (0.328, 95% CI [0.292, 0.367]), and deletion repairs 1...
| Authors | Wenzhang Du |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 9 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 August 2026 |
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