Eliciting Critical Reasoning in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models via Contrastive Explanations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ranaldi, Leonardo, Valentino, Marco, Freitas, Andrè
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Ranaldi, Leonardo
Valentino, Marco
Freitas, Andrè
author_facet Ranaldi, Leonardo
Valentino, Marco
Freitas, Andrè
contents Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a critical mechanism in contemporary NLP to support Large Language Models(LLMs) in systematically accessing richer factual context. However, the integration of RAG mechanisms brings its inherent challenges, as LLMs need to deal with potentially noisy contexts. Recent studies have shown that LLMs still struggle to critically analyse RAG-based in-context information, a limitation that may lead to incorrect inferences and hallucinations. In this paper, we investigate how to elicit critical reasoning in RAG via contrastive explanations. In particular, we propose Contrastive-RAG (C-RAG), a framework that (i) retrieves relevant documents given a query, (ii) selects and exemplifies relevant passages, and (iii) generates explanations that explicitly contrast the relevance of the passages to (iv) support the final answer. We show the impact of C-RAG building contrastive reasoning demonstrations from LLMs to instruct smaller models for retrieval-augmented tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that C-RAG improves state-of-the-art RAG models while (a) requiring significantly fewer prompts and demonstrations and (b) being robust to perturbations in the retrieved documents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_22874
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Eliciting Critical Reasoning in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models via Contrastive Explanations
Ranaldi, Leonardo
Valentino, Marco
Freitas, Andrè
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a critical mechanism in contemporary NLP to support Large Language Models(LLMs) in systematically accessing richer factual context. However, the integration of RAG mechanisms brings its inherent challenges, as LLMs need to deal with potentially noisy contexts. Recent studies have shown that LLMs still struggle to critically analyse RAG-based in-context information, a limitation that may lead to incorrect inferences and hallucinations. In this paper, we investigate how to elicit critical reasoning in RAG via contrastive explanations. In particular, we propose Contrastive-RAG (C-RAG), a framework that (i) retrieves relevant documents given a query, (ii) selects and exemplifies relevant passages, and (iii) generates explanations that explicitly contrast the relevance of the passages to (iv) support the final answer. We show the impact of C-RAG building contrastive reasoning demonstrations from LLMs to instruct smaller models for retrieval-augmented tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that C-RAG improves state-of-the-art RAG models while (a) requiring significantly fewer prompts and demonstrations and (b) being robust to perturbations in the retrieved documents.
title Eliciting Critical Reasoning in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models via Contrastive Explanations
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22874