In plain words: A tool scores systems that answer questions using text pulled from a database: it rates whether the retrieved passages fit the question, whether the answer sticks to them, and the answer's quality. It needs no human-written answers, so checks run faster than by hand.
Abstract
We introduce Ragas (Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment), a framework for reference-free evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. RAG systems are composed of a retrieval and an LLM based generation module, and provide LLMs with knowledge from a reference textual database, which enables them to act as a natural language layer between a user and textual databases, reducing the risk of hallucinations. Evaluating RAG architectures is, however, challenging because there are several dimensions to consider: the ability of the retrieval system to identify relevant and focused context passages, the ability of the LLM to exploit such passages in a faithful way, or the quality of the generation itself. With Ragas, we put forward a suite of metrics which can be used to evaluate these different dimensions \textit{without having to rely on ground truth human annotations}. We posit that such a framework can crucially contribute to faster evaluation cycles of RAG architectures, which is especially important given the fast adoption of LLMs.
Shahul Es, Jithin James, Luis Espinosa-Anke, Steven Schockaert
arXiv:2309.15217 · cs.CL · submitted Sep 26, 2023 · updated Apr 28, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Reference-free (not tied to having ground truth available) evaluation framework for retrieval agumented generation