List-aware Reranking-Truncation Joint Model for Search and Retrieval-augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xu, Shicheng, Pang, Liang, Xu, Jun, Shen, Huawei, Cheng, Xueqi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Xu, Shicheng
Pang, Liang
Xu, Jun
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
author_facet Xu, Shicheng
Pang, Liang
Xu, Jun
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
contents The results of information retrieval (IR) are usually presented in the form of a ranked list of candidate documents, such as web search for humans and retrieval-augmented generation for large language models (LLMs). List-aware retrieval aims to capture the list-level contextual features to return a better list, mainly including reranking and truncation. Reranking finely re-scores the documents in the list. Truncation dynamically determines the cut-off point of the ranked list to achieve the trade-off between overall relevance and avoiding misinformation from irrelevant documents. Previous studies treat them as two separate tasks and model them separately. However, the separation is not optimal. First, it is hard to share the contextual information of the ranking list between the two tasks. Second, the separate pipeline usually meets the error accumulation problem, where the small error from the reranking stage can largely affect the truncation stage. To solve these problems, we propose a Reranking-Truncation joint model (GenRT) that can perform the two tasks concurrently. GenRT integrates reranking and truncation via generative paradigm based on encoder-decoder architecture. We also design the novel loss functions for joint optimization to make the model learn both tasks. Sharing parameters by the joint model is conducive to making full use of the common modeling information of the two tasks. Besides, the two tasks are performed concurrently and co-optimized to solve the error accumulation problem between separate stages. Experiments on public learning-to-rank benchmarks and open-domain Q\&A tasks show that our method achieves SOTA performance on both reranking and truncation tasks for web search and retrieval-augmented LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_02764
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle List-aware Reranking-Truncation Joint Model for Search and Retrieval-augmented Generation
Xu, Shicheng
Pang, Liang
Xu, Jun
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
The results of information retrieval (IR) are usually presented in the form of a ranked list of candidate documents, such as web search for humans and retrieval-augmented generation for large language models (LLMs). List-aware retrieval aims to capture the list-level contextual features to return a better list, mainly including reranking and truncation. Reranking finely re-scores the documents in the list. Truncation dynamically determines the cut-off point of the ranked list to achieve the trade-off between overall relevance and avoiding misinformation from irrelevant documents. Previous studies treat them as two separate tasks and model them separately. However, the separation is not optimal. First, it is hard to share the contextual information of the ranking list between the two tasks. Second, the separate pipeline usually meets the error accumulation problem, where the small error from the reranking stage can largely affect the truncation stage. To solve these problems, we propose a Reranking-Truncation joint model (GenRT) that can perform the two tasks concurrently. GenRT integrates reranking and truncation via generative paradigm based on encoder-decoder architecture. We also design the novel loss functions for joint optimization to make the model learn both tasks. Sharing parameters by the joint model is conducive to making full use of the common modeling information of the two tasks. Besides, the two tasks are performed concurrently and co-optimized to solve the error accumulation problem between separate stages. Experiments on public learning-to-rank benchmarks and open-domain Q\&A tasks show that our method achieves SOTA performance on both reranking and truncation tasks for web search and retrieval-augmented LLMs.
title List-aware Reranking-Truncation Joint Model for Search and Retrieval-augmented Generation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02764