From Logs to Faults: Reference-Free Fault Localization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Pipelines

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines are widely used for domain-specific question answering, yet locating faults remains manual and time-consuming. Fault localization is challenging because RAG pipelines consist of interdependent stages, where faults can propagate downstream, masking their origin, or remain undetected even when the final answer is correct. Existing evaluation approaches often focus on individual stages and rely on reference answers or code instrumentation. We present RAGLog, which detects and localizes faults across RAG stages using execution logs, without requiring reference answers or code instrumentation. RAGLog transforms heterogeneous API logs into a common RAG schema and combines rule-based, embedding-based, and LLM-based checks to identify faulty stages. We introduce a live fault injector and RAGLog Faults, a dataset of 3,134 runs from five RAG pipelines with stage-level fault labels. With Claude Haiku 5.5, RAGLog achieves a pooled F1 score of 0.73 on runs with naturally occurring faults, outperforming Claude Code (0.58) and Codex (0.52), and comparable effectiveness on runs with injected faults (0.84 versus 0.80 and 0.82, respectively). It analyzes runs in approximately five seconds at US\$0.005 each, with overall lower cost and latency than agent baselines. RAGLog is available as an open-source tool for debugging, evaluating, and monitoring RAG pipelines.