When Confidence Takes the Wrong Path: Diagnosing Retrieval-State Lock-In in RAG
arXiv:2606.22728v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The trustworthiness of a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system depends on more than the answer it returns, yet many black-box uncertainty methods still read agreement among sampled answers as confidence. That inference fails when repeated samples condition on the same defective retrieval state. The state may be empty, with the model falling back on parametric memory, or populated by a coherent but wrong neighbourhood. In either case, the answ

