SIGIR 2025 -- LiveRAG Challenge Report
This challenge provided a competitive platform for comparing retrieval and prompting strategies in RAG, but it is incremental as it builds on existing RAG frameworks without introducing new methods.
The SIGIR 2025 LiveRAG Challenge tackled the problem of advancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies by having 70 teams from 27 countries develop RAG-based question-answering systems to answer 500 unseen questions within a two-hour window, with evaluation using automated LLM-as-a-judge and manual review.
The LiveRAG Challenge at SIGIR 2025, held between March and May 2025, provided a competitive platform for advancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies. Participants from academia and industry were invited to develop a RAG-based question-answering system using a fixed corpus (Fineweb-10BT) and a common open-source LLM (Falcon3-10B-Instruct). The goal was to facilitate challenging comparisons of retrieval and prompting strategies. During the Live Challenge Day, 70 teams from 27 different countries provided answers and supportive information to 500 unseen questions within a strict two-hour time window. Evaluation was conducted in two stages: first an automated LLM-as-a-judge approach was used to compute correctness and faithfulness score, then a manual review of top ranked submissions was conducted. The finalists were announced on June 12, 2025, with prizes awarded during the LiveRAG Workshop at SIGIR 2025 in Padua, Italy.