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SURE-RAG: Sufficiency and Uncertainty-Aware Evidence Verification for Selective Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Jingxi Qiu, Zeyu Han, Cheng Huang · May 5, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics General Llm As Judge
Open arXiv Find Implementation RSS feed Shortlist (0)

How to use this page

Moderate trust

Use this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Moderate

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, but retrieval is not verification: a passage can be topical and still fail to justify the answer. We frame this gap as evidence sufficiency verification for selective RAG answering: given a question, a candidate answer, and retrieved evidence, predict whether the evidence supports, refutes, or is insufficient, and abstain unless support is established. We present SURE-RAG, a transparent aggregation protocol built on the observation that evidence sufficiency is a set-level property: missing hops and unresolved conflicts cannot be detected by independent passage scoring. A shared pair-level claim-evidence verifier produces local relation distributions, which SURE-RAG aggregates into interpretable answer-level signals -- coverage, relation strength, disagreement, conflict, and retrieval uncertainty -- yielding a three-way decision and an auditable selective score. We evaluate on HotpotQA-RAG v3, a controlled multi-hop benchmark, under an artifact-aware protocol (shortcut baselines, counterfactual swaps, no-oracle checks, GPT-4o audits). Calibrated SURE-RAG reaches 0.9075 Macro-F1 (0.8951 +/- 0.0069), substantially above DeBERTa mean-pooling (0.6516) and a GPT-4o judge (0.7284), while matching a strong but opaque concat cross-encoder (0.8888 +/- 0.0109) with full auditability. Risk at 30% coverage drops from 0.2588 to 0.1642, a 37% reduction in unsafe answers. To deliberately probe the task boundary, we further contrast SURE-RAG with GPT-4o on HaluBench unsafe detection: the ranking reverses (0.3343 vs 0.7389 unsafe-F1), establishing that controlled sufficiency verification and natural hallucination detection are distinct problems.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A benchmark-and-metrics comparison anchor.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Trust level

Moderate

Usefulness score

37/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 55%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, but retrieval is not verification: a passage can be topical and still fail to justify the answer."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Llm As Judge, Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, but retrieval is not verification: a passage can be topical and still fail to justify the answer."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, but retrieval is not verification: a passage can be topical and still fail to justify the answer."

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

HotpotQA, Halubench

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"We evaluate on HotpotQA-RAG v3, a controlled multi-hop benchmark, under an artifact-aware protocol (shortcut baselines, counterfactual swaps, no-oracle checks, GPT-4o audits)."

Reported Metrics

strong

F1, F1 macro

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, but retrieval is not verification: a passage can be topical and still fail to justify the answer."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Unit of annotation: Ranking
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Llm As Judge, Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Moderate
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

HotpotQAHalubench

Reported Metrics

f1f1 macro

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, but retrieval is not verification: a passage can be topical and still fail to justify the answer.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, but retrieval is not verification: a passage can be topical and still fail to justify the answer.
  • We frame this gap as evidence sufficiency verification for selective RAG answering: given a question, a candidate answer, and retrieved evidence, predict whether the evidence supports, refutes, or is insufficient, and abstain unless support is established.
  • We present SURE-RAG, a transparent aggregation protocol built on the observation that evidence sufficiency is a set-level property: missing hops and unresolved conflicts cannot be detected by independent passage scoring.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

F1

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • We present SURE-RAG, a transparent aggregation protocol built on the observation that evidence sufficiency is a set-level property: missing hops and unresolved conflicts cannot be detected by independent passage scoring.
  • We evaluate on HotpotQA-RAG v3, a controlled multi-hop benchmark, under an artifact-aware protocol (shortcut baselines, counterfactual swaps, no-oracle checks, GPT-4o audits).
  • Calibrated SURE-RAG reaches 0.9075 Macro-F1 (0.8951 +/- 0.0069), substantially above DeBERTa mean-pooling (0.6516) and a GPT-4o judge (0.7284), while matching a strong but opaque concat cross-encoder (0.8888 +/- 0.0109) with full…

Why It Matters For Eval

  • We evaluate on HotpotQA-RAG v3, a controlled multi-hop benchmark, under an artifact-aware protocol (shortcut baselines, counterfactual swaps, no-oracle checks, GPT-4o audits).
  • Calibrated SURE-RAG reaches 0.9075 Macro-F1 (0.8951 +/- 0.0069), substantially above DeBERTa mean-pooling (0.6516) and a GPT-4o judge (0.7284), while matching a strong but opaque concat cross-encoder (0.8888 +/- 0.0109) with full…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Llm As Judge, Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Pass: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: HotpotQA, Halubench

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: f1, f1 macro

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Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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