Distributed Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Chenhao, Gao, Longxiang, Miao, Yuan, Zheng, Xi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Chenhao
Gao, Longxiang
Miao, Yuan
Zheng, Xi
author_facet Xu, Chenhao
Gao, Longxiang
Miao, Yuan
Zheng, Xi
contents As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly adopted on edge devices, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is gaining prominence as a solution to address factual deficiencies and hallucinations by integrating external knowledge. However, centralized RAG architectures face significant challenges in data privacy and scalability. For instance, smart healthcare services often rely on collecting sensitive patient data and building a centralized knowledge base to provide better diagnosis and treatment advice, while privacy concerns significantly impede this process. Besides, maintaining a comprehensive and continuously updated knowledge base is costly, particularly in response to regional epidemics and rapidly mutating viruses. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Distributed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (DRAG), a novel framework that improves data privacy by eliminating the need for a centralized knowledge base and restoring data control to owners. DRAG incorporates a Topic-Aware Random Walk (TARW) algorithm that leverages LLMs to extract query topics and facilitate targeted peer discovery within a peer-to-peer network, enabling efficient knowledge retrieval in decentralized environments. Extensive experiments across three diverse datasets and LLMs demonstrate that DRAG with TARW achieves near-centralized RAG performance by using half as many messages as flooding. The code is available at https://github.com/xuchenhao001/DRAG.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_00443
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distributed Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Xu, Chenhao
Gao, Longxiang
Miao, Yuan
Zheng, Xi
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly adopted on edge devices, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is gaining prominence as a solution to address factual deficiencies and hallucinations by integrating external knowledge. However, centralized RAG architectures face significant challenges in data privacy and scalability. For instance, smart healthcare services often rely on collecting sensitive patient data and building a centralized knowledge base to provide better diagnosis and treatment advice, while privacy concerns significantly impede this process. Besides, maintaining a comprehensive and continuously updated knowledge base is costly, particularly in response to regional epidemics and rapidly mutating viruses. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Distributed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (DRAG), a novel framework that improves data privacy by eliminating the need for a centralized knowledge base and restoring data control to owners. DRAG incorporates a Topic-Aware Random Walk (TARW) algorithm that leverages LLMs to extract query topics and facilitate targeted peer discovery within a peer-to-peer network, enabling efficient knowledge retrieval in decentralized environments. Extensive experiments across three diverse datasets and LLMs demonstrate that DRAG with TARW achieves near-centralized RAG performance by using half as many messages as flooding. The code is available at https://github.com/xuchenhao001/DRAG.
title Distributed Retrieval-Augmented Generation
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00443