Universal Pathologies, Conditional Consequences: A Triple-Robustness Analysis of RAG for Multi-Hop Traceability
A large-scale analysis of RAG architectures reveals that over-citation is a universal issue regardless of the embedder, corpus, or judge used.
Researchers conducted 4,440 retrieval runs across diverse corpora and models to isolate the causes of RAG performance gaps. The study concludes that over-citation is an inherent architectural limitation rather than a byproduct of specific retrieval components, suggesting that current RAG frameworks struggle with multi-hop traceability.
