FID-062 · Open question
Verified Retrieval Pipelines for Faith-Facing RAG
How can faith-facing retrieval-augmented generation pipelines be verified for whether they retrieve authoritative, relevant, context-preserving sources before generating answers about sacred texts, doctrine, practice, or institutional policy?
Why the question remains open
Many faith-facing AI failures begin before generation. If retrieval surfaces the wrong authority, a low-quality paraphrase, a fragment without context, or a source from a different tradition, the final answer may be polished but unsafe. Verified retrieval pipelines could make upstream failures visible before they become trusted religious guidance.
Working hypothesis
A proposition to test, not a finding.
Faith-facing RAG pipelines can be evaluated through retrieval proof obligations: source eligibility, authority match, relevance, context sufficiency, near-duplicate handling, corpus coverage, and abstention when no adequate source is available.
Proposed method
How the question could be tested
- 01Define retrieval tasks for sacred-text lookup, doctrinal explanation, pastoral-adjacent questions, institutional policy, and cross-tradition comparison.
- 02Add source metadata from a cross-faith source schema and test whether retrieval respects authority and scope constraints.
- 03Measure retrieval recall, authority match, context sufficiency, citation integrity, and answer impact.
- 04Compare standard vector retrieval, hybrid search, reranking, metadata filters, and verification-aware retrieval policies.
Needed controls
What must constrain the study
- 01Separate retrieval quality from generation quality.
- 02Include adversarial near matches, tradition-confused sources, incomplete context windows, and sources with similar language but different authority.
- 03Track corpus coverage and require abstention when the corpus cannot support an answer.
- 04Include copyrighted, restricted, or nonpublic source constraints in evaluation design.
Expected outputs
Artifacts the work should produce
- 01Verified retrieval protocol for faith-facing RAG.
- 02Retrieval proof-obligation checklist.
- 03Benchmark set for authority match, context sufficiency, and abstention.
- 04Comparison report across retrieval configurations.
- 05Deployment guidance for institutions building or buying RAG systems.
Open questions
Uncertainties the protocol must resolve
- 01Which retrieval failures most strongly predict harmful or misleading answers?
- 02How should a system explain that its corpus cannot support a user's question?
- 03Can retrieval verification be fast enough for production systems?
- 04How should verification handle traditions with multiple valid source hierarchies?
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Open question
Open work
Primary need: RAG evaluation, retrieval verification, source authority metadata
- Build retrieval harnesses and verification-aware RAG prototypes.
- Contribute source metadata, authority mappings, and adversarial retrieval cases.
- Review retrieval outputs for relevance, authority, and context sufficiency.
- Test abstention and uncertainty behavior when retrieval is inadequate.
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