GuardRAG: A Post-Retrieval Defense against Poisoning Attacks in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Overview & Synopsis

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the factual grounding of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external evidence, but also exposes them to corpus poisoning attacks. In particular, coordinated attacks can introduce multiple mutually reinforcing poisoned documents into retrieved contexts, making reliable evidence filtering challenging. To address this problem, we propose GuardRAG, a training-free and plug-and-play post-retrieval defense that exploits the semantic structure of retrieved evidence to identify suspicious document groups. Specifically, GuardRAG first expands the retrieval range and removes near-duplicate candidates, then partitions the retained documents using Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) with a query-adaptive threshold. Finally, it scores and prunes suspicious clusters based on query relevance, cluster size, and semantic compactness. Experiments across three question-answering datasets, multiple poisoning attacks, and six LLMs demonstrate that GuardRAG substantially reduces attack success rates while maintaining answer utility under clean retrieval.