RE-RAG: Improving Open-Domain QA Performance and Interpretability with Relevance Estimator in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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Auteurs principaux: Kim, Kiseung, Lee, Jay-Yoon
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Kim, Kiseung
Lee, Jay-Yoon
author_facet Kim, Kiseung
Lee, Jay-Yoon
contents The Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework utilizes a combination of parametric knowledge and external knowledge to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on open-domain question answering tasks. However, the RAG framework suffers from performance degradation when the query is accompanied by irrelevant contexts. In this work, we propose the RE-RAG framework, which introduces a relevance estimator (RE) that not only provides relative relevance between contexts as previous rerankers did, but also provides confidence, which can be used to classify whether given context is useful for answering the given question. We propose a weakly supervised method for training the RE simply utilizing question-answer data without any labels for correct contexts. We show that RE trained with a small generator (sLM) can not only improve the sLM fine-tuned together with RE but also improve previously unreferenced large language models (LLMs). Furthermore, we investigate new decoding strategies that utilize the proposed confidence measured by RE such as choosing to let the user know that it is "unanswerable" to answer the question given the retrieved contexts or choosing to rely on LLM's parametric knowledge rather than unrelated contexts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_05794
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RE-RAG: Improving Open-Domain QA Performance and Interpretability with Relevance Estimator in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Kim, Kiseung
Lee, Jay-Yoon
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework utilizes a combination of parametric knowledge and external knowledge to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on open-domain question answering tasks. However, the RAG framework suffers from performance degradation when the query is accompanied by irrelevant contexts. In this work, we propose the RE-RAG framework, which introduces a relevance estimator (RE) that not only provides relative relevance between contexts as previous rerankers did, but also provides confidence, which can be used to classify whether given context is useful for answering the given question. We propose a weakly supervised method for training the RE simply utilizing question-answer data without any labels for correct contexts. We show that RE trained with a small generator (sLM) can not only improve the sLM fine-tuned together with RE but also improve previously unreferenced large language models (LLMs). Furthermore, we investigate new decoding strategies that utilize the proposed confidence measured by RE such as choosing to let the user know that it is "unanswerable" to answer the question given the retrieved contexts or choosing to rely on LLM's parametric knowledge rather than unrelated contexts.
title RE-RAG: Improving Open-Domain QA Performance and Interpretability with Relevance Estimator in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05794