
StaleBench measures answer freshness in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems, after a fact changes, how long a system keeps giving the old answer instead of the new one. It reports catch-up latency & recovery rate across refresh policies (never, batch, immediate), scored by exact match against a controlled ground truth (no language model as a judge), and runs on any RAG system whose documents can be changed. Across ten open models from three families (Qwen, Llama, Gemma; released 2024 to 2026), about half of all answers stay stale even with immediate re-indexing; the cause is the position of the documents in the context, not the retrieval. It also finds the cause, document position, and tests a fix (placing the newest document last) that attempts to solve it for capable models but backfires on others, so each system must be measured rather than assumed.
Large Language Models, retrieval-augmented generation, RAG, Evaluation, answer freshness, catch-up latency
Large Language Models, retrieval-augmented generation, RAG, Evaluation, answer freshness, catch-up latency
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