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Abstract
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) integrates external knowledge into large
language models to improve response quality. However, recent work has shown
that RAG systems are highly vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where malicious
texts are inserted into the knowledge database to influence model outputs.
While several defenses have been proposed, they are often circumvented by more
adaptive or sophisticated attacks.
This paper presents RAGOrigin, a black-box responsibility attribution
framework designed to identify which texts in the knowledge database are
responsible for misleading or incorrect generations. Our method constructs a
focused attribution scope tailored to each misgeneration event and assigns a
responsibility score to each candidate text by evaluating its retrieval
ranking, semantic relevance, and influence on the generated response. The
system then isolates poisoned texts using an unsupervised clustering method. We
evaluate RAGOrigin across seven datasets and fifteen poisoning attacks,
including newly developed adaptive poisoning strategies and multi-attacker
scenarios. Our approach outperforms existing baselines in identifying poisoned
content and remains robust under dynamic and noisy conditions. These results
suggest that RAGOrigin provides a practical and effective solution for tracing
the origins of corrupted knowledge in RAG systems.