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arXiv · 2509.07620

Towards End-to-End Model-Agnostic Explanations for RAG Systems

Viju Sudhi·Sinchana Ramakanth Bhat·Max Rudat·Roman Teucher·Nicolas Flores-Herr
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Abstract

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, despite their growing popularity for enhancing model response reliability, often struggle with trustworthiness and explainability. In this work, we present a novel, holistic, model-agnostic, post-hoc explanation framework leveraging perturbation-based techniques to explain the retrieval and generation processes in a RAG system. We propose different strategies to evaluate these explanations and discuss the sufficiency of model-agnostic explanations in RAG systems. With this work, we further aim to catalyze a collaborative effort to build reliable and explainable RAG systems.

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Viju Sudhi, Sinchana Ramakanth Bhat, Max Rudat, Roman Teucher, Nicolas Flores-Herr. 2025-09-09. Towards End-to-End Model-Agnostic Explanations for RAG Systems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07620

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