RAG Hallucinations

Do not start by changing the model. First inspect the evidence available to it.

Diagnose

Query → retrieval → ranked chunks → final context → generation → answer

Check each stage independently. If the required evidence never reaches the model, generation changes cannot repair the retrieval failure.

Fix → Verify → Prevent

Improve the confirmed weak stage, then verify with a representative evaluation set. Keep regression cases for questions that previously produced unsupported answers.