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

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.