Step 5: Identify the root cause of quality issues

Expected time: 60 minutes

Requirements

1. Your Evaluation results for the POC are available in MLflow

   • If you followed the previous step, this will be the case!

2. All requirements from previous steps

Code Repository

You can find all of the sample code referenced throughout this section here.

Overview

Retrieval and generation are the 2 primary buckets of root causes. To determine where we focus on first, we use the output of the Mosaic AI Agent Evaluation’s LLM judges that you ran in the previous step to identify the most frequent root cause that impacts your app’s quality.

Each row your evaluation set will be tagged as follows:

1. Overall assessment: or

2. Root cause: Improve Retrieval or Improve Generation

3. Root cause rationale: A brief description of why the root cause was selected

Instructions

The approach depends on if your evaluation set contains the ground-truth responses to your questions - stored in expected_response. If you have expected_response available, use the first table below. Otherwise, use the second table.

1. Open the B_quality_iteration/01_root_cause_quality_issues Notebook

2. Run the cells that are relevant to your use case e.g., if you do or don’t have expected_response

3. Review the output tables to determine the most frequent root cause in your application

4. For each root cause, follow the steps below to further debug and identify potential fixes:

   • Debugging retrieval quality

   • Debugging generation quality

Root cause analysis with available ground truth

Note

If you have human labeled ground-truth for which document should be retrieved for each question, you can optionally substitute retrieval/llm_judged/chunk_relevance/precision/average with the score for retrieval/ground_truth/document_recall/average.

Chunk relevance precision	Groundedness	Correctness	Relevance to query	Issue summary	Root cause	Overall Rating
<50%	❌	❌	❌	Retrieval is poor.	Improve Retrieval
<50%	❌	❌	✅	LLM generates relevant response, but retrieval is poor e.g., the LLM ignores retrieval and uses its training knowledge to answer.	Improve Retrieval
<50%	❌	✅	✅ or ❌	Retrieval quality is poor, but LLM gets the answer correct regardless.	Improve Retrieval
<50%	✅	❌	❌	Response is grounded in retrieval, but retrieval is poor.	Improve Retrieval
<50%	✅	❌	✅	Relevant response grounded in the retrieved context, but retrieval may not be related to the expected answer.	Improve Retrieval
<50%	✅	✅	✅ or ❌	Retrieval finds enough information for the LLM to correctly answer. 🎉	N/A
>50%	❌	❌	✅ or ❌	Hallucination	Improve Generation
>50%	❌	✅	✅ or ❌	Hallucination, correct but generates details not in context	Improve Generation
>50%	✅	❌	❌	Good retrieval, but the LLM does not provide a relevant response.	Improve Generation
>50%	✅	❌	✅	Good retrieval and relevant response, but not correct.	Improve Generation
>50%	✅	✅	✅	No issue!! 🎉	N/A

Root cause analysis without available ground truth

Chunk relevance precision	Groundedness	Relevance to Query	Issue summary	Root cause	Overall rating
<50%	❌	❌	Retrieval quality is poor	Improve Retrieval
<50%	❌	✅	Retrieval quality is poor	Improve Retrieval
<50%	✅	❌	Response is grounded in retrieval, but retrieval is poor.	Improve Retrieval
<50%	✅	✅	Relevant response grounded in the retrieved context and relevant, but retrieval is poor.	Improve Retrieval
>50%	❌	❌	Hallucination	Improve Generation
>50%	❌	✅	Hallucination	Improve Generation
>50%	✅	❌	Good retrieval & grounded, but LLM does not provide a relevant response.	Improve Generation
>50%	✅	✅	Good retrieval and relevant response. Collect ground-truth to know if the answer is correct.	None