Measuring and Enhancing Trustworthiness of LLMs in RAG through Grounded Attributions and Learning to Refuse
Maojia Song, Shang Hong Sim, Rishabh Bhardwaj, Hai Leong Chieu, Navonil Majumder, Soujanya Poria
Abstract
LLMs are an integral component of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. While many studies focus on evaluating the overall quality of end-to-end RAG systems, there is a gap in understanding the appropriateness of LLMs for the RAG task. To address this, we introduce Trust-Score, a holistic metric that evaluates the trustworthiness of LLMs within the RAG framework. Our results show that various prompting methods, such as in-context learning, fail to effectively adapt LLMs to the RAG task as measured by Trust-Score. Consequently, we propose Trust-Align, a method to align LLMs for improved Trust-Score performance. 26 out of 27 models aligned using Trust-Align substantially outperform competitive baselines on ASQA, QAMPARI, and ELI5. Specifically, in LLaMA-3-8b, Trust-Align outperforms FRONT on ASQA (↑12.56), QAMPARI (↑36.04), and ELI5 (↑17.69). Trust-Align also significantly enhances models’ ability to correctly refuse and provide quality citations. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of Trust-Align across different open-weight models, including the LLaMA series (1b to 8b), Qwen-2.5 series (0.5b to 7b), and Phi3.5 (3.8b). We release our code at https://github.com/declare-lab/trust-align.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
song2025measuring,
title={Measuring and Enhancing Trustworthiness of {LLM}s in {RAG} through Grounded Attributions and Learning to Refuse},
author={Maojia Song and Shang Hong Sim and Rishabh Bhardwaj and Hai Leong Chieu and Navonil Majumder and Soujanya Poria},
booktitle={The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=Iyrtb9EJBp}
}