SIGIR 2025 -- LiveRAG Challenge Report

TL;DR

The LiveRAG Challenge at SIGIR 2025 showcased advancements in retrieval-augmented generation by evaluating diverse systems on a fixed corpus and open-source LLM, fostering innovation in question-answering technologies.

Contribution

This report documents a large-scale, international competition that benchmarked RAG-based question-answering systems using standardized datasets and evaluation methods.

Findings

70 teams participated from 27 countries

500 questions answered within two hours

Automated and manual evaluation methods used

Abstract

The LiveRAG Challenge at SIGIR 2025, held between March and May 2025, provided a competitive platform for advancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies. Participants from academia and industry were invited to develop a RAG-based question-answering system using a fixed corpus (Fineweb-10BT) and a common open-source LLM (Falcon3-10B-Instruct). The goal was to facilitate challenging comparisons of retrieval and prompting strategies. During the Live Challenge Day, 70 teams from 27 different countries provided answers and supportive information to 500 unseen questions within a strict two-hour time window. Evaluation was conducted in two stages: first an automated LLM-as-a-judge approach was used to compute correctness and faithfulness score, then a manual review of top ranked submissions was conducted. The finalists were announced on June 12, 2025, with prizes awarded during the LiveRAG Workshop at SIGIR 2025 in Padua, Italy.