Most RAG Hallucinations Are Retrieval Failures: How the Retrieval Brick Decides What the Model Can Invent
a confident wrong answer, the instinct is to reach for the generation knobs: a stricter prompt, a bigger model, a temperature of zero. That treats a retrieval failure as a generation failure. The model was handed the wrong pages and did its job on them. Retrieval decides what the model can invent, because it decides…