{"paper":{"title":"Quantifying reliance on external information over parametric knowledge during Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) using mechanistic analysis","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Ehsan Aghazadeh, Hitesh Wadhwa, Rahul Seetharaman, Reshmi Ghosh, Samyadeep Basu, Shreyas Chaudhari, Somyaa Aggarwal, Soundararajan Srinivasan, Wenlong Zhao","submitted_at":"2024-10-01T16:48:13Z","abstract_excerpt":"Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a widely used approach for leveraging external context in several natural language applications such as question answering and information retrieval. Yet, the exact nature in which a Language Model (LM) leverages this non-parametric memory or retrieved context isn't clearly understood. This paper mechanistically examines the RAG pipeline to highlight that LMs demonstrate a \"shortcut'' effect and have a strong bias towards utilizing the retrieved context to answer questions, while relying minimally on model priors. We propose (a) Causal Mediation Analysis"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2410.00857","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2410.00857/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}