Faithfulness
The extent to which an output is consistent with, and legitimately supported by, the provided materials, context, or retrieved evidence.
Example
A source says only that sales increased, but the summary adds a specific growth percentage not contained in that source.
Distinctions and cautions
Faithfulness is evaluated against the given source or context, unlike factuality, which is evaluated against external reality or reference knowledge. Usage overlaps with Groundedness in research literature. Within this catalog, Faithfulness emphasizes non-contradiction with the material, while Groundedness places stronger emphasis on evidence supporting—and being traceable to—individual claims.
Terminology note
The boundary between Faithfulness and Groundedness is not fully standardized across the literature. The distinction presented here is an editorial organization within this Catalog, intended to remain consistent with the existing evidence.
Evidence
View evidence →
On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization
- Title
- On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization
- Author / organization
- Maynez et al.
- Year
- 2020
- Source type / publication status
- ACL peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Faithfulness, Factuality, Hallucination boundary.
- Scope and limitations
- Focused on summarization, but provides foundational evidence for the source-versus-world distinction.
- Access / version note
- Published ACL.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.173(DOI resolver)
ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
- Title
- ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
- Author / organization
- Saad-Falcon et al.
- Year
- 2024
- Source type / publication status
- NAACL peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Context relevance, answer faithfulness, answer relevance, Retrieval Failure.
- Scope and limitations
- The evaluator design itself can introduce errors.
- Access / version note
- Published NAACL.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.20(DOI resolver)
Overview of the TREC 2025 Retrieval Augmented Generation Track
- Title
- Overview of the TREC 2025 Retrieval Augmented Generation Track
- Author / organization
- NIST TREC 2025
- Year
- 2025
- Source type / publication status
- Official evaluation proceedings; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Grounding, completeness, attribution, retrieval/relevance, RAG evaluation.
- Scope and limitations
- Operational definitions for a shared evaluation task, not standardized definitions.
- Access / version note
- Official proceedings page.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- Official URL / recorded link
FaithfulRAG: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling for Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Title
- FaithfulRAG: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling for Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Author / organization
- Zhang et al.
- Year
- 2025
- Source type / publication status
- ACL peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Grounding, Faithfulness, Knowledge Conflict, RAG limitations.
- Scope and limitations
- Conflict-focused RAG conditions; strict adherence to context can also have failure modes.
- Access / version note
- Published ACL.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1062(DOI resolver)
Discerning and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts through Adaptive Decoding with Contextual Information-Entropy Constraint
- Title
- Discerning and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts through Adaptive Decoding with Contextual Information-Entropy Constraint
- Author / organization
- Yuan et al.
- Year
- 2024
- Source type / publication status
- Findings ACL peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Knowledge Conflict; contextual versus parametric knowledge.
- Scope and limitations
- Depends on the studied conflict datasets and decoding method.
- Access / version note
- Published ACL Findings.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.234(DOI resolver)