Most RAG Hallucinations Are Extraction Errors: Seven Patterns for a Typed Generation Contract

Short summary

The article reframes common RAG hallucinations as extraction errors rather than generation failures, since the model has read the context but failed to pull the correct information. It proposes seven typed-contract patterns to enforce structured, verifiable generation output. A decomposition rule is also offered to make these patterns viable for smaller models.

• •RAG 'hallucinations' are better understood as extraction errors when the model has context but retrieves wrong info
• •Seven typed-contract patterns enforce structured generation to keep output verifiable
• •A decomposition rule adapts these contracts for smaller models

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