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Active Retrieval Augmented Generation

Paper · 2023 · Zhengbao Jiang, Frank Xu, Luyu Gao et al.

Summary

Large language models often hallucinate facts. Standard retrieval-augmented approaches retrieve documents only once, using the input query itself as the search query. This is insufficient for long-form text, because new information is constantly needed during generation. The authors describe a general framework of active retrieval in which the model itself decides when to retrieve and what exactly to retrieve. Building on it, they propose the FLARE method. The model first writes a draft of the next sentence. If the draft contains low-probability tokens, it becomes a search query: the uncertain words are masked, or the draft is turned into questions. The sentence is then regenerated, grounded in the retrieved documents. The method requires no additional training and works with an existing LM at inference time. Experiments were conducted on text-davinci-003 (GPT-3.5) with four datasets that require long-form answers: 2WikiMultihopQA, StrategyQA, ASQA, and WikiAsp. On all four, FLARE outperforms or matches the single-time and multi-time retrieval baselines. The work shows that retrieval should be oriented toward upcoming content and triggered only when the model is uncertain.

Key points

  • The authors propose two variants of the method. In FLARE_instruct, the model, guided by few-shot prompts as in Toolformer, inserts [Search(query)] queries into the text itself. In FLARE_direct, the draft of the next sentence serves as the query.
  • Retrieving with the next sentence yields clearly better results than retrieving with the previous one. Using more than 32 previous tokens as the query degrades quality.
  • Masking uncertain tokens in the query is beneficial. On 2WikiMultihopQA, EM rises from 0.488 without masking (β = 0) to 0.510 at β = 0.4. Implicit query formulation (masking) and explicit formulation (question generation) yield nearly identical results.
  • Performance is best when retrieval is triggered for 40–80% of sentences. On StrategyQA, retrieving for more than 50% of sentences worsens the result due to noise.
  • Limitations: on Wizard of Wikipedia and ELI5, the method gave no noticeable gain. Interleaving generation and retrieval also increases computational cost. Code and data are available at github.com/jzbjyb/FLARE.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

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 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksInformation Systems · 1,437 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Information retrieval & search · 473 works

💡 Concepts 1Key ideas and methods explained on our concept pages.Retrieval-augmented generation · 50 works

Cite

Cite as Zhengbao Jiang, Frank Xu, Luyu Gao, Zhiqing Sun, Qian Liu, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yiming Yang, Jamie Callan and Graham Neubig. 2023. Active Retrieval Augmented Generation. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.495 · arXiv 2305.06983

@inproceedings{jiang2023active,
  title = {{Active Retrieval Augmented Generation}},
  author = {Zhengbao Jiang, Frank Xu, Luyu Gao, Zhiqing Sun, Qian Liu, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yiming Yang, Jamie Callan and Graham Neubig},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.495},
  eprint = {2305.06983},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.495}
}

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