Open-Source Reproduction and Explainability Analysis of Corrective Retrieval Augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Yalavarthi, Surya Vardhan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yalavarthi, Surya Vardhan
author_facet Yalavarthi, Surya Vardhan
contents Corrective Retrieval Augmented Generation (CRAG) improves the robustness of RAG systems by evaluating retrieved document quality and triggering corrective actions. However, the original implementation relies on proprietary components including the Google Search API and closed model weights, limiting reproducibility. In this work, we present a fully open-source reproduction of CRAG, replacing proprietary web search with the Wikipedia API and the original LLaMA-2 generator with Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct. We evaluate on PopQA and ARC-Challenge, demonstrating that our open-source pipeline achieves comparable performance to the original system. Furthermore, we contribute the first explainability analysis of CRAG's T5-based retrieval evaluator using SHAP, revealing that the evaluator primarily relies on named entity alignment rather than semantic similarity. Our analysis identifies key failure modes including domain transfer limitations on science questions. All code and results are available at https://github.com/suryayalavarthi/crag-reproduction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16169
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Open-Source Reproduction and Explainability Analysis of Corrective Retrieval Augmented Generation
Yalavarthi, Surya Vardhan
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Corrective Retrieval Augmented Generation (CRAG) improves the robustness of RAG systems by evaluating retrieved document quality and triggering corrective actions. However, the original implementation relies on proprietary components including the Google Search API and closed model weights, limiting reproducibility. In this work, we present a fully open-source reproduction of CRAG, replacing proprietary web search with the Wikipedia API and the original LLaMA-2 generator with Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct. We evaluate on PopQA and ARC-Challenge, demonstrating that our open-source pipeline achieves comparable performance to the original system. Furthermore, we contribute the first explainability analysis of CRAG's T5-based retrieval evaluator using SHAP, revealing that the evaluator primarily relies on named entity alignment rather than semantic similarity. Our analysis identifies key failure modes including domain transfer limitations on science questions. All code and results are available at https://github.com/suryayalavarthi/crag-reproduction.
title Open-Source Reproduction and Explainability Analysis of Corrective Retrieval Augmented Generation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16169