End-to-end evaluation of RAG systems in LLMs
While evaluating the individual components of a RAG system (retrieval and generation) is important, it is also crucial to assess the system’s overall performance in an end-to-end manner. End-to-end evaluation considers the entire RAG pipeline, from the initial user query to the final generated response, providing a holistic view of the system’s effectiveness.
Let’s take a look at some holistic metrics:
- Task success: For task-oriented RAG systems (e.g., QA, dialogue), we can measure the overall task success rate. This involves determining whether the generated response completes the intended task successfully.
Here are some techniques for evaluating this metric:
- Automated evaluation: For some tasks, we can automatically evaluate task success. For example, in QA, we can check whether the generated answer matches the gold-standard answer.
- Human evaluation: For more complex tasks, human evaluation might be necessary...