Use Five Whys on a Local RAG Hallucination
Diagnose a local RAG hallucination by tracing causes through retrieval, corpus, prompt, and review.
The local RAG bot told Support that refunds are allowed after 45 days, but the current policy says 30 days. Use Five Whys to move from the bad answer to the retrieval, corpus, prompt, and review condition that caused it. The trap is blaming the base model immediately. In RAG systems, the model may be faithfully summarizing the wrong chunk. Why 1 Why did the answer say 45 days? Because the retrieved context included a 2023 refund memo with a 45-day exception. The first why anchors the investigation in evidence: the actual retrieved chunk, not an assumption about model behavior.…
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