Accelerating Adaptive Retrieval Augmented Generation via Instruction-Driven Representation Reduction of Retrieval Overlaps

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ou, Jie, Guo, Jinyu, Jiang, Shuaihong, Wang, Zhaokun, Qin, Libo, Yao, Shunyu, Tian, Wenhong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ou, Jie
Guo, Jinyu
Jiang, Shuaihong
Wang, Zhaokun
Qin, Libo
Yao, Shunyu
Tian, Wenhong
author_facet Ou, Jie
Guo, Jinyu
Jiang, Shuaihong
Wang, Zhaokun
Qin, Libo
Yao, Shunyu
Tian, Wenhong
contents Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal method for expanding the knowledge of large language models. To handle complex queries more effectively, researchers developed Adaptive-RAG (A-RAG) to enhance the generated quality through multiple interactions with external knowledge bases. Despite its effectiveness, A-RAG exacerbates the pre-existing efficiency challenges inherent in RAG, which are attributable to its reliance on multiple iterations of generation. Existing A-RAG approaches process all retrieved contents from scratch. However, they ignore the situation where there is a significant overlap in the content of the retrieval results across rounds. The overlapping content is redundantly represented, which leads to a large proportion of repeated computations, thus affecting the overall efficiency. To address this issue, this paper introduces a model-agnostic approach that can be generally applied to A-RAG methods, which is dedicated to reducing the redundant representation process caused by the overlapping of retrieval results. Specifically, we use cache access and parallel generation to speed up the prefilling and decoding stages respectively. Additionally, we also propose an instruction-driven module to further guide the model to more effectively attend to each part of the content in a more suitable way for LLMs. Experiments show that our approach achieves 2.79 and 2.33 times significant acceleration on average for prefilling and decoding respectively while maintaining equal generation quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12731
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerating Adaptive Retrieval Augmented Generation via Instruction-Driven Representation Reduction of Retrieval Overlaps
Ou, Jie
Guo, Jinyu
Jiang, Shuaihong
Wang, Zhaokun
Qin, Libo
Yao, Shunyu
Tian, Wenhong
Artificial Intelligence
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal method for expanding the knowledge of large language models. To handle complex queries more effectively, researchers developed Adaptive-RAG (A-RAG) to enhance the generated quality through multiple interactions with external knowledge bases. Despite its effectiveness, A-RAG exacerbates the pre-existing efficiency challenges inherent in RAG, which are attributable to its reliance on multiple iterations of generation. Existing A-RAG approaches process all retrieved contents from scratch. However, they ignore the situation where there is a significant overlap in the content of the retrieval results across rounds. The overlapping content is redundantly represented, which leads to a large proportion of repeated computations, thus affecting the overall efficiency. To address this issue, this paper introduces a model-agnostic approach that can be generally applied to A-RAG methods, which is dedicated to reducing the redundant representation process caused by the overlapping of retrieval results. Specifically, we use cache access and parallel generation to speed up the prefilling and decoding stages respectively. Additionally, we also propose an instruction-driven module to further guide the model to more effectively attend to each part of the content in a more suitable way for LLMs. Experiments show that our approach achieves 2.79 and 2.33 times significant acceleration on average for prefilling and decoding respectively while maintaining equal generation quality.
title Accelerating Adaptive Retrieval Augmented Generation via Instruction-Driven Representation Reduction of Retrieval Overlaps
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12731