Beyond Relevance: On the Relationship Between Retrieval and RAG Information Coverage

arXiv:2603.08819v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems combine document retrieval with a generative model to address complex information seeking tasks like report generation. While the relationship between retrieval quality and generation effectiveness seems intuitive, it has not been systematically studied. We investigate whether upstream retrieval metrics can serve as reliable early indicators of the final generated response's information coverag