EDUCATION & TRAINING
Your RAG System Retrieves the Right Data — But Still Produces Wrong Answers. Here’s Why (and How to Fix It).
Towards Data Science
About This Tutorial
Your RAG system is retrieving the right documents with perfect scores - yet it still confidently returns the wrong answer. I built a 220 MB experiment that proves the hidden failure mode almost nobody talks about: conflicting context in the same retrieval window. Two contradictory documents come back, the model picks one, and you get a fluent but incorrect response with zero warning. This article shows exactly why it happens, the three production scenarios where it silently breaks, and the tiny pipeline layer that fixes it - no extra model, no GPU, no API key required.