RAR-b: Reasoning as Retrieval Benchmark

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Xiao, Chenghao, Hudson, G Thomas, Moubayed, Noura Al
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914792845869056
author Xiao, Chenghao
Hudson, G Thomas
Moubayed, Noura Al
author_facet Xiao, Chenghao
Hudson, G Thomas
Moubayed, Noura Al
contents Semantic textual similartiy (STS) and information retrieval tasks (IR) tasks have been the two major avenues to record the progress of embedding models in the past few years. Under the emerging Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm, we envision the need to evaluate next-level language understanding abilities of embedding models, and take a conscious look at the reasoning abilities stored in them. Addressing this, we pose the question: Can retrievers solve reasoning problems? By transforming reasoning tasks into retrieval tasks, we find that without specifically trained for reasoning-level language understanding, current state-of-the-art retriever models may still be far from being competent for playing the role of assisting LLMs, especially in reasoning-intensive tasks. Moreover, albeit trained to be aware of instructions, instruction-aware IR models are often better off without instructions in inference time for reasoning tasks, posing an overlooked retriever-LLM behavioral gap for the research community to align. However, recent decoder-based embedding models show great promise in narrowing the gap, highlighting the pathway for embedding models to achieve reasoning-level language understanding. We also show that, although current off-the-shelf re-ranker models fail on these tasks, injecting reasoning abilities into them through fine-tuning still appears easier than doing so to bi-encoders, and we are able to achieve state-of-the-art performance across all tasks by fine-tuning a reranking model. We release Reasoning as Retrieval Benchmark (RAR-b), a holistic suite of tasks and settings to evaluate the reasoning abilities stored in retriever models. RAR-b is available at https://github.com/gowitheflow-1998/RAR-b.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_06347
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RAR-b: Reasoning as Retrieval Benchmark
Xiao, Chenghao
Hudson, G Thomas
Moubayed, Noura Al
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Semantic textual similartiy (STS) and information retrieval tasks (IR) tasks have been the two major avenues to record the progress of embedding models in the past few years. Under the emerging Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm, we envision the need to evaluate next-level language understanding abilities of embedding models, and take a conscious look at the reasoning abilities stored in them. Addressing this, we pose the question: Can retrievers solve reasoning problems? By transforming reasoning tasks into retrieval tasks, we find that without specifically trained for reasoning-level language understanding, current state-of-the-art retriever models may still be far from being competent for playing the role of assisting LLMs, especially in reasoning-intensive tasks. Moreover, albeit trained to be aware of instructions, instruction-aware IR models are often better off without instructions in inference time for reasoning tasks, posing an overlooked retriever-LLM behavioral gap for the research community to align. However, recent decoder-based embedding models show great promise in narrowing the gap, highlighting the pathway for embedding models to achieve reasoning-level language understanding. We also show that, although current off-the-shelf re-ranker models fail on these tasks, injecting reasoning abilities into them through fine-tuning still appears easier than doing so to bi-encoders, and we are able to achieve state-of-the-art performance across all tasks by fine-tuning a reranking model. We release Reasoning as Retrieval Benchmark (RAR-b), a holistic suite of tasks and settings to evaluate the reasoning abilities stored in retriever models. RAR-b is available at https://github.com/gowitheflow-1998/RAR-b.
title RAR-b: Reasoning as Retrieval Benchmark
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06347