Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery in Astrophysics

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Hauptverfasser: Xu, Xueqing, Bolliet, Boris, Dimitrov, Adrian, Laverick, Andrew, Villaescusa-Navarro, Francisco, Xu, Licong, Zubeldia, Íñigo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Xu, Xueqing
Bolliet, Boris
Dimitrov, Adrian
Laverick, Andrew
Villaescusa-Navarro, Francisco
Xu, Licong
Zubeldia, Íñigo
author_facet Xu, Xueqing
Bolliet, Boris
Dimitrov, Adrian
Laverick, Andrew
Villaescusa-Navarro, Francisco
Xu, Licong
Zubeldia, Íñigo
contents We evaluate 9 Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) agent configurations on 105 Cosmology Question-Answer (QA) pairs that we built specifically for this purpose.The RAG configurations are manually evaluated by a human expert, that is, a total of 945 generated answers were assessed. We find that currently the best RAG agent configuration is with OpenAI embedding and generative model, yielding 91.4\% accuracy. Using our human evaluation results we calibrate LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaaJ) system which can be used as a robust proxy for human evaluation. These results allow us to systematically select the best RAG agent configuration for multi-agent system for autonomous scientific discovery in astrophysics (e.g., cmbagent presented in a companion paper) and provide us with an LLMaaJ system that can be scaled to thousands of cosmology QA pairs. We make our QA dataset, human evaluation results, RAG pipelines, and LLMaaJ system publicly available for further use by the astrophysics community.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_07155
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery in Astrophysics
Xu, Xueqing
Bolliet, Boris
Dimitrov, Adrian
Laverick, Andrew
Villaescusa-Navarro, Francisco
Xu, Licong
Zubeldia, Íñigo
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Artificial Intelligence
We evaluate 9 Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) agent configurations on 105 Cosmology Question-Answer (QA) pairs that we built specifically for this purpose.The RAG configurations are manually evaluated by a human expert, that is, a total of 945 generated answers were assessed. We find that currently the best RAG agent configuration is with OpenAI embedding and generative model, yielding 91.4\% accuracy. Using our human evaluation results we calibrate LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaaJ) system which can be used as a robust proxy for human evaluation. These results allow us to systematically select the best RAG agent configuration for multi-agent system for autonomous scientific discovery in astrophysics (e.g., cmbagent presented in a companion paper) and provide us with an LLMaaJ system that can be scaled to thousands of cosmology QA pairs. We make our QA dataset, human evaluation results, RAG pipelines, and LLMaaJ system publicly available for further use by the astrophysics community.
title Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery in Astrophysics
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07155