mtRAG: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Young-Suk Lee

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has recently become a very popular task for Large Language Models (LLMs). Evaluating them on multi-turn RAG conversations, where the system is asked to generate a response to a question in the context of a preceding conversation, is an important and often overlooked task with several additional challenges. We present mtRAG, an end-to-end human-generated multi-turn RAG benchmark that reflects several real-world properties across diverse dimensions for evaluating the full RAG pipeline. mtRAG contains 110 conversations averaging 7.7 turns each across four domains for a total of 842 tasks. We also explore automation paths via synthetic data and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. Our human and automatic evaluations show that even state-of-the-art LLM RAG systems struggle on mtRAG. We demonstrate the need for strong retrieval and generation systems that can handle later turns, unanswerable questions, non-standalone questions, and multiple domains. mtRAG is available at https://github.com/ibm/mt-rag-benchmark.