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

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.

Accepted to Workshop on Explainability in Information Retrieval (WExIR), SIGIR 2025 - July 17, 2025