Ziawasch Abedjan
Author directory2026
Quantifying Retriever-Generator Alignment in RAG with Local Explanations
Korbinian Randl | Guido Rocchietti | Aron Henriksson | Ziawasch Abedjan | Tony Lindgren | John Pavlopoulos
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Korbinian Randl | Guido Rocchietti | Aron Henriksson | Ziawasch Abedjan | Tony Lindgren | John Pavlopoulos
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems combine dense retrievers and language models to ground outputs in external documents. However, the interaction between these components remains opaque, creating challenges for deployment in high-stakes domains. We present RAG-E, an end-to-end explainability framework that quantifies retriever-generator alignment through mathematically grounded attribution methods. Our approach adapts Integrated Gradients for retriever analysis, proposes a Monte Carlo-stabilized Shapley Value approximation for generator attribution, and introduces the *Weighted Alignment between Retriever and Generator* (WARG) metric to measure how closely the generator’s document usage aligns with retriever rankings. Experiments on PopQA, QAMPARI, and TREC CAST datasets reveal substantial misalignment: depending on the model and setting, generators often ignore top-ranked documents and rely on documents ranked as less relevant. We show that WARG captures retriever-generator alignment better than Pearson and Spearman correlations and can serve as an indicator of RAG performance. RAG-E and WARG provide a practical framework for auditing this interaction, enabling more reliable and transparent RAG systems.