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Discussion on: How to Make RAG Show Its Evidence: Claim Verification at 15M-Document Scale

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squeaky_spirit profile image
Squeaky •

A re-pull can't catch it, and that's the point: nothing in the answer is false, so there's nothing for a query to contradict. The leap only exists once the claims are arranged.

So the check moves up a level. Extract the conclusion the arrangement implies, treat it as a claim of its own, and test it against the union of the cited evidence rather than one chunk at a time. Then run the same evidence in a different order. If the verdict flips at constant evidence, order was doing the work.

Your perturbation test is the right instinct and cheaper than it sounds: two runs on identical input, not a new pipeline. Bin the result unverifiable, not single-sourced. Single-sourced points at a missing witness. This one has every witness and still overreaches.

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gnomeman4201 profile image
GnomeMan4201 •

Really useful distinction… especially the point about unverifiable versus single-sourced. Having all the evidence present doesn’t mean the conclusion drawn from it is justified.

I like the idea of extracting the implied conclusion and treating it as its own claim. That gets much closer to the actual failure mode than checking each statement independently.

The ordering test seems like a good place to start too. One thing I’d want to separate is verdict instability from evidentiary validity. If changing the order flips the verdict, we’ve demonstrated sensitivity to framing, but even a stable verdict could consistently endorse an unsupported inference.

I’m thinking the useful experiment might be to hold the evidence constant, vary its arrangement, and compare both the implied conclusions and their support against an independently defined standard.

Really appreciate you taking the time to work through this. You’ve helped turn something I’ve been struggling to articulate into a much more concrete test. I’m ready to run some tests and see what actually happens.