Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang


Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, particularly in specialized domains. While many RAG approaches have been proposed to enhance large language models through query-dependent retrievals, these approaches still suffer from their complex implementation and prolonged response times. Typically, a RAG workflow involves multiple processing steps, each of which can be executed in various ways. Here, we investigate existing RAG approaches and their potential combinations to identify optimal RAG practices. Through extensive experiments, we suggest several strategies for deploying RAG that balance both performance and efficiency. Moreover, we demonstrate that multimodal retrieval techniques can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities about visual inputs and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a “retrieval as generation” strategy.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.981
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17716–17736
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.981
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.981
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, and Xuanjing Huang. 2024. Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 17716–17736, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Wang et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.981.pdf