The RAT: A Unified Bayesian Model for RAG Evaluation
Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems requires assessing not only end-to-end correctness but also how individual components interact and how errors propagate through the pipeline. We introduce a Bayesian evaluation framework that jointly models retrieval success, abstention behavior, and answer correctness, factorized according to the pipeline's information flow. The model distinguishes task success. Whether the user received a correct answer (from generator success) and whether the generator behaved appropriately given the retrieval outcome. We apply the framework to 27 RAG