Configuring RAG Systems: What Breaks, Where Originates, and How to Fix

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for improving Large Language Model (LLM) by intertwining it with other components, such as a vector/graph database. Therefore, the resulting RAG systems are often highly configurable, under which a non-trivial amount of failures are related to the configurations. However, there remains a lack of systematic understanding regarding the configuration issues for RAG systems. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of 654 real-world configuration issues collected from 10 diverse RAG systems. Drawing on this, we provide a complete categorization of the symptoms, root causes, relevant stages, and fix patterns of configuration issues for RAG systems, as well as several new observations. Our findings not only reveal the characteristics of configuration issues, but also strongly link them to the unique pipeline stages of RAG, e.g., we found that most symptoms can be observed at the early or late stage, while the stage of the root cause might not be at the same stage as where the symptom is identified. We also provide nine actionable insights to the practitioners on testing, localizing, and fixing the configuration issues for RAG systems.