RAG Failure Maps
A retrieval-first exploration of where RAG systems break, from weak chunk boundaries and noisy evidence to grounding failures and misleading answer confidence.
RAG Failure Maps is a conceptual note on retrieval failure analysis. No linked experiment implementation or reproduced result is provided for this entry.
Candidate failure categories include poor chunk boundaries, irrelevant top results, partial evidence, and unsupported answer confidence. These categories are a proposed inspection lens, not measured findings from a dataset on this page.
A useful RAG workflow needs more than retrieval plus generation. It needs a way to inspect the path from query to evidence to answer. That means separating parsing problems from chunking problems, chunking problems from ranking problems, and ranking problems from generation behavior.
Testing this lens would require labeled queries, source documents, scoring definitions, and inspectable per-query reports. See the separate public RAG prototype for a source-backed implementation and its documented limitations.