Retrieval Failure
A failure to obtain information needed for an answer or operation, or the retrieval of irrelevant or otherwise unsuitable information instead.
Example
A collection contains a condition necessary to answer a question, but retrieval fails to surface it and the model answers using unrelated material.
Distinctions and cautions
When relevant information is already in a long context but is not used, the failure is closer to Long-context Utilization Failure. A disagreement between internal knowledge and supplied information is Knowledge Conflict. Retrieval-Augmented Generation does not guarantee accurate retrieval, and Retrieval Failure is not synonymous with Grounding, which concerns the connection of generated output to evidence.
Evidence
View evidence →
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)
Astute RAG: Overcoming Imperfect Retrieval Augmentation and Knowledge Conflicts for Large Language Models
- Title
- Astute RAG: Overcoming Imperfect Retrieval Augmentation and Knowledge Conflicts for Large Language Models
- Author / organization
- Wang et al.
- Year
- 2025
- Source type / publication status
- ACL peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Retrieval Failure, RAG, Knowledge Conflict.
- Scope and limitations
- Controlled RAG analyses; no universal extrapolation to all retrievers or domains.
- Access / version note
- Published ACL.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1476(DOI resolver)