Magic Mushroom: A Customizable Benchmark for Fine-grained Analysis of Retrieval Noise Erosion in RAG Systems

TL;DR

Magic Mushroom is a customizable benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems against complex, heterogeneous retrieval noise, facilitating targeted improvements in real-world scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces Magic Mushroom, a novel benchmark that simulates realistic retrieval noise and allows flexible configuration for evaluating RAG system robustness.

Findings

Both generators and denoising strategies are highly sensitive to noise.

Significant room for improvement in noise robustness of RAG systems.

Magic Mushroom effectively evaluates noise impact on RAG performance.

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external retrieved information, mitigating issues such as hallucination and outdated knowledge. However, RAG systems are highly sensitive to retrieval noise prevalent in real-world scenarios. Existing benchmarks fail to emulate the complex and heterogeneous noise distributions encountered in real-world retrieval environments, undermining reliable robustness assessment. In this paper, we define four categories of retrieval noise based on linguistic properties and noise characteristics, aiming to reflect the heterogeneity of noise in real-world scenarios. Building on this, we introduce Magic Mushroom, a benchmark for replicating "magic mushroom" noise: contexts that appear relevant on the surface but covertly mislead RAG systems. Magic Mushroom comprises 7,468 single-hop and 3,925 multi-hop question-answer pairs. More importantly, Magic Mushroom enables researchers to flexibly configure combinations of retrieval noise according to specific research objectives or application scenarios, allowing for highly controlled evaluation setups. We evaluate LLM generators of varying parameter scales and classic RAG denoising strategies under diverse noise distributions to investigate their performance dynamics during progressive noise encroachment. Our analysis reveals that both generators and denoising strategies have significant room for improvement and exhibit extreme sensitivity to noise distributions. Magic Mushroom emerges as a promising tool for evaluating and advancing noise-robust RAG systems, accelerating their widespread deployment in real-world applications. The Magic Mushroom benchmark is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aP5kyPuk4L-L_uoI6T9UhxuTyt8oMqjT/view?usp=sharing.