LayerRAG-Bench: A Cross-Layer Reliability Benchmark for Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:Agentic retrieval-augmented generation systems can produce answers that appear grounded while failing at the evidence, tool-contract, authorization, or session-state layer. We introduce LayerRAG-Bench, a controlled cross-layer reliability benchmark with 8 enterprise domains, 240 tasks, 9 fault scenarios, 2 contract modes, and 38,880 live task-level records across nine models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini. Schema normalization raises schema-drift success from 0.000 to 0.913, but stale evidence, missing tool output, denied permissions, and wrong-session context are not recovered by schema normalization. Groundedness-only evaluation also produces substantial false positives under stale and wrong-session evidence. These results support a layer-specific evaluation principle: a reliability intervention should be credited for repairing its target layer without being mistaken for a universal fix.

10 pages, 9 tables. Code and data: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2607.27353 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.27353v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.27353 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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