# A Decentralized Retrieval Augmented Generation System with Source Reliabilities Secured on Blockchain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07577 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07577/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Privacy and security of RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 16 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Privacy and security of RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/privacy-and-security-of-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16893/) (2024)
- [Seven Failure Points When Engineering a Retrieval Augmented Generation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05856/) (2024)
- [AgentNet: Decentralized Evolutionary Coordination for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00587/) (2025)
- [Conditional probing: measuring usable information beyond a baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09234/) (2021)
- [Mitigating the Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) via Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14773/) (2024)
- [TokenSHAP: Interpreting Large Language Models with Monte Carlo Shapley Value Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10114/) (2024)
- [M-RAG: Reinforcing Large Language Model Performance through Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Multiple Partitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16420/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Study of Best Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07391/) (2025)
- [UnSeenTimeQA: Time-Sensitive Question-Answering Beyond LLMs' Memorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03525/) (2024)
- [Privacy-Preserving Federated Embedding Learning for Localized Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19101/) (2025)
- [LLM-Net: Democratizing LLMs-as-a-Service through Blockchain-based Expert Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07288/) (2025)
- [Federated Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Systematic Mapping Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18906/) (2025)
- [Decentralizing AI Memory: SHIMI, a Semantic Hierarchical Memory Index for Scalable Agent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06135/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [TrustRAG: Blockchain-Enhanced RAG via Committee-Based Credibility Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20097/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically use a centralized architecture, causing a high cost of data collection, integration, and management, as well as privacy concerns. There is a great need for a decentralized RAG system that enables foundation models to utilize information directly from data owners who maintain full control over their sources. However, decentralization brings a challenge: the numerous independent data sources vary significantly in reliability, which can diminish retrieval accuracy and response quality. To address this, our decentralized RAG system has a novel reliability scoring mechanism that dynamically evaluates each source based on the quality of responses it contributes to generate and prioritizes high-quality sources during retrieval. To ensure transparency and trust, the scoring process is securely managed through blockchain-based smart contracts, creating verifiable and tamper-proof reliability records without relying on a central authority. We evaluate our decentralized system with two Llama models (3B and 8B) in two simulated environments where six data sources have different levels of reliability. Our system achieves a +10.7% performance improvement over its centralized counterpart in the real world-like unreliable data environments. Notably, it approaches the upper-bound performance of centralized systems under ideally reliable data environments. The decentralized infrastructure enables secure and trustworthy scoring management, achieving approximately 56% marginal cost savings through batched update operations. Our code and system are open-sourced at github.com/yining610/Reliable-dRAG.