Evaluating the Retrieval Robustness of Large Language Models

Abstract

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) generally enhances large language models' (LLMs) ability to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. But RAG could also lead to performance degradation due to imperfect retrieval and the model's limited ability to leverage retrieved content. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of LLMs in practical RAG setups (henceforth retrieval robustness). We focus on three research questions: (1) whether RAG is always better than non-RAG; (2) whether more retrieved documents always lead to better performance; and (3) whether document order impacts results. To facilitate this study, we establish a benchmark of 1,891 samples spanning five datasets across three task categories, each with documents retrieved using both sparse and dense retrievers. We introduce three robustness metrics, each corresponding to one research question. Our experiments across 11 LLMs show that models achieve generally high retrieval robustness, but robustness varies substantially across tasks, suggesting that the decision to adopt RAG remains a case-by-case consideration. We further examine four additional prompting strategies that vary how models interact with retrieved documents. We find that Qwen and GPT models suffer notable robustness declines when reasoning is disabled, even on single-hop QA tasks, and that providing retrieved documents as tool responses improves Claude models but hurts Qwen and GPT models, highlighting potential issues of the GPT models regardless of their best overall robustness under vanilla prompting.