Faithfulness
Faithfulness measures whether every claim in an output is supported by the retrieved context. It is the core RAG hallucination check (RAGAS faithfulness, autoevals Faithfulness, UiPath FaithfulnessEvaluator), answered by Jev as a 0–4 level with a probability per level.
What the evaluator does
Jev treats `context` as the only source of truth and rates how much of `output` can be traced to it, from “most claims unsupported or contradicted” to “every claim traceable and nothing added”. The expected level, its distribution and a pass at 0.75 are returned.
Rate how faithfully every claim in `output` is supported by `context`. Treat `context` as the only source of truth.
The question, verbatim
This is the question the API sends for the example below, generated from the same code path the playground and API use. Jev sees the request fields as state and returns a probability for each outcome. Nothing is generated, so there is nothing to parse.
Rate how faithfully every claim in `output` is supported by the retrieved `context`. Treat `context` as the only source of truth.
- 0Most claims in the output are not supported by the context or contradict it
- 1Several claims go beyond the context; some are supported
- 2Nearly all claims are supported by the context with minor unsupported detail
- 3Every claim in the output can be traced to the context
- 4Every claim is traceable and the output adds nothing the context does not state
Reach for it when
- Any RAG pipeline: did the answer stay inside the retrieved documents?
- Summarisation: did the summary invent anything?
- Agent reports that must cite sources.
Not the right tool when
- The context is not meant to be complete (the model is allowed outside knowledge); then a low score is not a defect.
- You need to know which claim failed; pair with chunk_support for per-chunk attribution.
Watch out for
- Correct inferences from the context (unit conversions, arithmetic) are still faithful; the rubric allows them, but check your gold labels agree.
- Unit swaps and order-of-magnitude slips are the failure mode that matters; the jeval benchmark includes them.
What to send
score 0–1 (expected level ÷ top level), label “x.x / n”, confidence, a probability per level, passed at 75% of the scale.
{
"evaluators": [
"faithfulness"
],
"input": "What does Jev cost?",
"output": "Jev costs $42 per million input tokens.",
"context": [
"Context length: 64k tokens per request; 32k tokens for `state` plus the longest question.",
"Rate limits: 250,000 tokens per second / 1,200 requests per minute.",
"Price: $42 per billion input tokens ($0.042 per million). Output tokens are free."
]
}Level 0: the number is right but the unit is wrong (per billion), which contradicts the context.
Aggregate with
One result per item is a fact; a dataset of them is a metric. These are the aggregations that fit this evaluator's output shape.
Mean score averages the normalised 0–1 score across items.
Pass rate is the share of items whose evaluator result met its threshold.
Mean absolute error measures, for graded rubrics, how far the evaluator's level is from the gold level on average.
- What is faithfulness in RAG evaluation?
- The share of an answer's claims that are supported by the retrieved context. jeval returns it as a 0–4 level from Jev with a probability per level, so a wrong unit on a right number scores near 0.
- How is faithfulness different from answer correctness?
- Faithfulness compares the answer with the context; correctness compares it with a reference answer. An answer can be faithful to bad context and still be wrong.