Toward Robust RALMs: Revealing the Impact of Imperfect Retrieval on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Park, Seong-Il, Lee, Jay-Yoon
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Park, Seong-Il
Lee, Jay-Yoon
author_facet Park, Seong-Il
Lee, Jay-Yoon
contents Retrieval Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have gained significant attention for their ability to generate accurate answer and improve efficiency. However, RALMs are inherently vulnerable to imperfect information due to their reliance on the imperfect retriever or knowledge source. We identify three common scenarios-unanswerable, adversarial, conflicting-where retrieved document sets can confuse RALM with plausible real-world examples. We present the first comprehensive investigation to assess how well RALMs detect and handle such problematic scenarios. Among these scenarios, to systematically examine adversarial robustness we propose a new adversarial attack method, Generative model-based ADVersarial attack (GenADV) and a novel metric Robustness under Additional Document (RAD). Our findings reveal that RALMs often fail to identify the unanswerability or contradiction of a document set, which frequently leads to hallucinations. Moreover, we show the addition of an adversary significantly degrades RALM's performance, with the model becoming even more vulnerable when the two scenarios overlap (adversarial+unanswerable). Our research identifies critical areas for assessing and enhancing the robustness of RALMs, laying the foundation for the development of more robust models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_15107
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Robust RALMs: Revealing the Impact of Imperfect Retrieval on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models
Park, Seong-Il
Lee, Jay-Yoon
Computation and Language
Retrieval Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have gained significant attention for their ability to generate accurate answer and improve efficiency. However, RALMs are inherently vulnerable to imperfect information due to their reliance on the imperfect retriever or knowledge source. We identify three common scenarios-unanswerable, adversarial, conflicting-where retrieved document sets can confuse RALM with plausible real-world examples. We present the first comprehensive investigation to assess how well RALMs detect and handle such problematic scenarios. Among these scenarios, to systematically examine adversarial robustness we propose a new adversarial attack method, Generative model-based ADVersarial attack (GenADV) and a novel metric Robustness under Additional Document (RAD). Our findings reveal that RALMs often fail to identify the unanswerability or contradiction of a document set, which frequently leads to hallucinations. Moreover, we show the addition of an adversary significantly degrades RALM's performance, with the model becoming even more vulnerable when the two scenarios overlap (adversarial+unanswerable). Our research identifies critical areas for assessing and enhancing the robustness of RALMs, laying the foundation for the development of more robust models.
title Toward Robust RALMs: Revealing the Impact of Imperfect Retrieval on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15107