Solving Freshness in RAG: A Simple Recency Prior and the Limits of Heuristic Trend Detection

We address temporal failures in RAG systems using two methods on cybersecurity data. A simple recency prior achieved an accuracy of 1.00 on freshness tasks. In contrast, a clustering heuristic for topic evolution failed (0.08 F1-score), showing trend detection requires methods beyond simple heuristics.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-09-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.36227/techrxiv.175832475.57637876/v1
Primary Topic
Human Resource Development and Performance Evaluation
Type
article
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article

Solving Freshness in RAG: A Simple Recency Prior and the Limits of Heuristic Trend Detection

Matt Grofsky
Human Resource Development and Performance Evaluation
article

Solving Freshness in RAG: A Simple Recency Prior and the Limits of Heuristic Trend Detection

Matt Grofsky
article en

Abstract

We address temporal failures in RAG systems using two methods on cybersecurity data. A simple recency prior achieved an accuracy of 1.00 on freshness tasks. In contrast, a clustering heuristic for topic evolution failed (0.08 F1-score), showing trend detection requires methods beyond simple heuristics.

Openalex Percentile: Top 72%
Human Resource Development and Performance Evaluation
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Solving Freshness in RAG: A Simple Recency Prior and the Limits of Heuristic Trend Detection — Matt Grofsky · (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS