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Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Iterative Retrieval-Generation Synergy

Zhihong Shao, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Minlie Huang, Nan Duan, Weizhu Chen


Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation has raise extensive attention as it is promising to address the limitations of large language models including outdated knowledge and hallucinations. However, retrievers struggle to capture relevance, especially for queries with complex information needs. Recent work has proposed to improve relevance modeling by having large language models actively involved in retrieval, i.e., to guide retrieval with generation. In this paper, we show that strong performance can be achieved by a method we call Iter-RetGen, which synergizes retrieval and generation in an iterative manner: a model’s response to a task input shows what might be needed to finish the task, and thus can serve as an informative context for retrieving more relevant knowledge which in turn helps generate a better response in another iteration. Compared with recent work which interleaves retrieval with generation when completing a single output, Iter-RetGen processes all retrieved knowledge as a whole and largely preserves the flexibility in generation without structural constraints. We evaluate Iter-RetGen on multi-hop question answering, fact verification, and commonsense reasoning, and show that it can flexibly leverage parametric knowledge and non-parametric knowledge, and is superior to or competitive with state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented baselines while causing fewer overheads of retrieval and generation. We can further improve performance via generation-augmented retrieval adaptation.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.620
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9248–9274
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.620
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.620
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhihong Shao, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Minlie Huang, Nan Duan, and Weizhu Chen. 2023. Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Iterative Retrieval-Generation Synergy. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 9248–9274, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Iterative Retrieval-Generation Synergy (Shao et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.620.pdf