RetrievalQA: Assessing Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Short-form Open-Domain Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Zihan, Fang, Meng, Chen, Ling
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Zhang, Zihan
Fang, Meng
Chen, Ling
author_facet Zhang, Zihan
Fang, Meng
Chen, Ling
contents Adaptive retrieval-augmented generation (ARAG) aims to dynamically determine the necessity of retrieval for queries instead of retrieving indiscriminately to enhance the efficiency and relevance of the sourced information. However, previous works largely overlook the evaluation of ARAG approaches, leading to their effectiveness being understudied. This work presents a benchmark, RetrievalQA, comprising 1,271 short-form questions covering new world and long-tail knowledge. The knowledge necessary to answer the questions is absent from LLMs; therefore, external information must be retrieved to answer correctly. This makes RetrievalQA a suitable testbed to evaluate existing ARAG methods. We observe that calibration-based methods heavily rely on threshold tuning, while vanilla prompting is inadequate for guiding LLMs to make reliable retrieval decisions. Based on our findings, we propose Time-Aware Adaptive Retrieval (TA-ARE), a simple yet effective method that helps LLMs assess the necessity of retrieval without calibration or additional training. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/hyintell/RetrievalQA
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_16457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RetrievalQA: Assessing Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Short-form Open-Domain Question Answering
Zhang, Zihan
Fang, Meng
Chen, Ling
Computation and Language
Adaptive retrieval-augmented generation (ARAG) aims to dynamically determine the necessity of retrieval for queries instead of retrieving indiscriminately to enhance the efficiency and relevance of the sourced information. However, previous works largely overlook the evaluation of ARAG approaches, leading to their effectiveness being understudied. This work presents a benchmark, RetrievalQA, comprising 1,271 short-form questions covering new world and long-tail knowledge. The knowledge necessary to answer the questions is absent from LLMs; therefore, external information must be retrieved to answer correctly. This makes RetrievalQA a suitable testbed to evaluate existing ARAG methods. We observe that calibration-based methods heavily rely on threshold tuning, while vanilla prompting is inadequate for guiding LLMs to make reliable retrieval decisions. Based on our findings, we propose Time-Aware Adaptive Retrieval (TA-ARE), a simple yet effective method that helps LLMs assess the necessity of retrieval without calibration or additional training. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/hyintell/RetrievalQA
title RetrievalQA: Assessing Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Short-form Open-Domain Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16457