Parametric Retrieval Augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Su, Weihang, Tang, Yichen, Ai, Qingyao, Yan, Junxi, Wang, Changyue, Wang, Hongning, Ye, Ziyi, Zhou, Yujia, Liu, Yiqun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Su, Weihang
Tang, Yichen
Ai, Qingyao
Yan, Junxi
Wang, Changyue
Wang, Hongning
Ye, Ziyi
Zhou, Yujia
Liu, Yiqun
author_facet Su, Weihang
Tang, Yichen
Ai, Qingyao
Yan, Junxi
Wang, Changyue
Wang, Hongning
Ye, Ziyi
Zhou, Yujia
Liu, Yiqun
contents Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have emerged as a promising solution to enhance the reliability of large language models (LLMs) by addressing issues like hallucinations, outdated knowledge, and domain adaptation. In particular, existing RAG methods append relevant documents retrieved from external corpus or databases to the input of LLMs to guide their generation process, which we refer to as the in-context knowledge injection method. While this approach is simple and often effective, it has inherent limitations. Firstly, increasing the context length and number of relevant documents can lead to higher computational overhead and degraded performance, especially in complex reasoning tasks. More importantly, in-context knowledge injection operates primarily at the input level, but LLMs store their internal knowledge in their parameters. This gap fundamentally limits the capacity of in-context methods. To this end, we introduce Parametric retrieval-augmented generation (Parametric RAG), a new RAG paradigm that integrates external knowledge directly into the parameters of feed-forward networks (FFN) of an LLM through document parameterization. This approach not only saves online computational costs by eliminating the need to inject multiple documents into the LLMs' input context, but also deepens the integration of external knowledge into the parametric knowledge space of the LLM. Experimental results demonstrate that Parametric RAG substantially enhances both the effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge augmentation in LLMs. Also, it can be combined with in-context RAG methods to achieve even better performance. We have open-sourced all the code, data, and models in the following anonymized GitHub link: https://github.com/oneal2000/PRAG
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_15915
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Parametric Retrieval Augmented Generation
Su, Weihang
Tang, Yichen
Ai, Qingyao
Yan, Junxi
Wang, Changyue
Wang, Hongning
Ye, Ziyi
Zhou, Yujia
Liu, Yiqun
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have emerged as a promising solution to enhance the reliability of large language models (LLMs) by addressing issues like hallucinations, outdated knowledge, and domain adaptation. In particular, existing RAG methods append relevant documents retrieved from external corpus or databases to the input of LLMs to guide their generation process, which we refer to as the in-context knowledge injection method. While this approach is simple and often effective, it has inherent limitations. Firstly, increasing the context length and number of relevant documents can lead to higher computational overhead and degraded performance, especially in complex reasoning tasks. More importantly, in-context knowledge injection operates primarily at the input level, but LLMs store their internal knowledge in their parameters. This gap fundamentally limits the capacity of in-context methods. To this end, we introduce Parametric retrieval-augmented generation (Parametric RAG), a new RAG paradigm that integrates external knowledge directly into the parameters of feed-forward networks (FFN) of an LLM through document parameterization. This approach not only saves online computational costs by eliminating the need to inject multiple documents into the LLMs' input context, but also deepens the integration of external knowledge into the parametric knowledge space of the LLM. Experimental results demonstrate that Parametric RAG substantially enhances both the effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge augmentation in LLMs. Also, it can be combined with in-context RAG methods to achieve even better performance. We have open-sourced all the code, data, and models in the following anonymized GitHub link: https://github.com/oneal2000/PRAG
title Parametric Retrieval Augmented Generation
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15915