RARE: Redundancy-Aware Retrieval Evaluation Framework for High-Similarity Corpora

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cho, Hanjun, Lee, Jay-Yoon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917425016995840
author Cho, Hanjun
Lee, Jay-Yoon
author_facet Cho, Hanjun
Lee, Jay-Yoon
contents Existing QA benchmarks typically assume distinct documents with minimal overlap, yet real-world retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems operate on corpora such as financial reports, legal codes, and patents, where information is highly redundant and documents exhibit strong inter-document similarity. This mismatch undermines evaluation validity: retrievers can be unfairly undervalued even when they retrieve documents that provide sufficient evidence, because redundancy across documents is not accounted for in evaluation. On the other hand, retrievers that perform well on standard benchmarks often generalize poorly to real-world corpora with highly similar and redundant documents. We present RARE (Redundancy-Aware Retrieval Evaluation), a framework for constructing realistic benchmarks by (i) decomposing documents into atomic facts to enable precise redundancy tracking and (ii) enhancing LLM-based data generation with CRRF. RAG benchmark data usually requires multiple quality criteria, but LLMs often yield trivial outputs. CRRF scores criteria separately and fuses decisions by rank, improving the reliability of generated data. Applying RARE to Finance, Legal, and Patent corpora, we introduce RedQA, where a strong retriever baseline drops from 66.4% PerfRecall@10 on 4-hop General-Wiki to 5.0-27.9% PerfRecall@10 at 4-hop depth, revealing robustness gaps that current benchmarks fail to capture. RARE enables practitioners to build domain-specific RAG evaluations that faithfully reflect real-world deployment conditions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_19047
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RARE: Redundancy-Aware Retrieval Evaluation Framework for High-Similarity Corpora
Cho, Hanjun
Lee, Jay-Yoon
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
I.2.7; H.3.3
Existing QA benchmarks typically assume distinct documents with minimal overlap, yet real-world retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems operate on corpora such as financial reports, legal codes, and patents, where information is highly redundant and documents exhibit strong inter-document similarity. This mismatch undermines evaluation validity: retrievers can be unfairly undervalued even when they retrieve documents that provide sufficient evidence, because redundancy across documents is not accounted for in evaluation. On the other hand, retrievers that perform well on standard benchmarks often generalize poorly to real-world corpora with highly similar and redundant documents. We present RARE (Redundancy-Aware Retrieval Evaluation), a framework for constructing realistic benchmarks by (i) decomposing documents into atomic facts to enable precise redundancy tracking and (ii) enhancing LLM-based data generation with CRRF. RAG benchmark data usually requires multiple quality criteria, but LLMs often yield trivial outputs. CRRF scores criteria separately and fuses decisions by rank, improving the reliability of generated data. Applying RARE to Finance, Legal, and Patent corpora, we introduce RedQA, where a strong retriever baseline drops from 66.4% PerfRecall@10 on 4-hop General-Wiki to 5.0-27.9% PerfRecall@10 at 4-hop depth, revealing robustness gaps that current benchmarks fail to capture. RARE enables practitioners to build domain-specific RAG evaluations that faithfully reflect real-world deployment conditions.
title RARE: Redundancy-Aware Retrieval Evaluation Framework for High-Similarity Corpora
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
I.2.7; H.3.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19047