LayerRAG-Bench: A Cross-Layer Reliability Benchmark for Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can produce superficially grounded answers while failing at the evidence, tool-contract, authorization, or session-state layers. This paper introduces LayerRAG-Bench, a controlled cross-layer reliability benchmark covering 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 does not recover stale evidence, missing tool output, denied permissions, or wrong-session context. Groundedness-only evaluation also yields substantial false positives under stale and wrong-session evidence. The authors advocate a layer-specific evaluation principle: credit an intervention only for repairing its target layer, not as a universal fix.
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[Submitted on 29 Jul 2026]
Title:LayerRAG-Bench: A Cross-Layer Reliability Benchmark for Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation
View a PDF of the paper titled LayerRAG-Bench: A Cross-Layer Reliability Benchmark for Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation, by Musa Shams (Independent Researcher)
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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.
Comments: 10 pages, 9 tables. Code and data: this https URL
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.27353 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2607.27353v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.27353
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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From: Musa Shams [view email] [v1] Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:09:17 UTC (28 KB)
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