Description

RAG system does not handle out-of-domain queries gracefully. Users receive irrelevant or hallucinated results when asking questions outside document scope. No confidence threshold or fallback mechanism.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Document collection contains only HR policies
2. User asks "What is quantum computing?"
3. System attempts to answer from HR documents
4. Results are nonsensical or hallucinated
5. User receives incorrect information

Environment Information

• RAG confidence: Not measured
• Fallback mechanism: None
• Threshold handling: Not implemented
• Error handling: Insufficient

Expected Behavior

• System detects out-of-domain queries
• Returns "No relevant documents found"
• Confidence threshold prevents low-quality results
• Clear message when knowledge gap exists
• User directed to appropriate resources

Actual Behavior

• Attempts to answer anyway
• Hallucinated or irrelevant results
• No confidence checking
• Misleading information

Code Reference

• File: src/retrieval/confidence_checker.py
• Missing: Confidence threshold checking
• Missing: Out-of-domain detection
• Missing: Fallback response handling

Additional Context

This is a Level 2 reliability issue. Fix requires:

• Adding confidence threshold (e.g., 0.7)
• Implementing out-of-domain detection
• Clear error messaging
• Fallback response handling

Suggested Labels

bug, reliability, hallucination-prevention, confidence-scoring, error-handling