Context Quality Matters in Training Fusion-in-Decoder for Extractive Open-Domain Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Akimoto, Kosuke, Takeoka, Kunihiro, Oyamada, Masafumi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Akimoto, Kosuke
Takeoka, Kunihiro
Oyamada, Masafumi
author_facet Akimoto, Kosuke
Takeoka, Kunihiro
Oyamada, Masafumi
contents Retrieval-augmented generation models augment knowledge encoded in a language model by providing additional relevant external knowledge (context) during generation. Although it has been shown that the quantity and quality of context impact the performance of retrieval-augmented generation models during inference, limited research explores how these characteristics affect model training. This paper explores how context quantity and quality during model training affect the performance of Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD), the state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation model, in extractive open-domain question answering tasks. Experimental results suggest that FiD models overfit to context quality during training and show suboptimal performance when evaluated on different context quality. Through the experimental results, we also reveal FiD models trained with different context quality have different cross-attention distribution patterns. Specifically, as context quality during training increases, FiD models tend to attend more uniformly to each passage in context. Finally, based on these observations, we propose a method to mitigate overfitting to specific context quality by introducing bias to the cross-attention distribution, which we demonstrate to be effective in improving the performance of FiD models on different context quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_14197
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Context Quality Matters in Training Fusion-in-Decoder for Extractive Open-Domain Question Answering
Akimoto, Kosuke
Takeoka, Kunihiro
Oyamada, Masafumi
Computation and Language
Retrieval-augmented generation models augment knowledge encoded in a language model by providing additional relevant external knowledge (context) during generation. Although it has been shown that the quantity and quality of context impact the performance of retrieval-augmented generation models during inference, limited research explores how these characteristics affect model training. This paper explores how context quantity and quality during model training affect the performance of Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD), the state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation model, in extractive open-domain question answering tasks. Experimental results suggest that FiD models overfit to context quality during training and show suboptimal performance when evaluated on different context quality. Through the experimental results, we also reveal FiD models trained with different context quality have different cross-attention distribution patterns. Specifically, as context quality during training increases, FiD models tend to attend more uniformly to each passage in context. Finally, based on these observations, we propose a method to mitigate overfitting to specific context quality by introducing bias to the cross-attention distribution, which we demonstrate to be effective in improving the performance of FiD models on different context quality.
title Context Quality Matters in Training Fusion-in-Decoder for Extractive Open-Domain Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14197