RetrievalQA: Assessing Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Short-form Open-Domain Question Answering

Zihan Zhang, Meng Fang, Ling Chen


Abstract
Adaptive retrieval-augmented generation (ARAG) aims to dynamically determine the necessity of retrieval for queries instead of retrieving indiscriminately to enhance the efficiency and relevance of the sourced information. However, previous works largely overlook the evaluation of ARAG approaches, leading to their effectiveness being understudied. This work presents a benchmark, RetrievalQA, comprising 1,271 short-form questions covering new world and long-tail knowledge. The knowledge necessary to answer the questions is absent from LLMs; therefore, external information must be retrieved to answer correctly. This makes RetrievalQA a suitable testbed to evaluate existing ARAG methods. We observe that calibration-based methods heavily rely on threshold tuning, while vanilla prompting is inadequate for guiding LLMs to make reliable retrieval decisions. Based on our findings, we propose Time-Aware Adaptive Retrieval (TA-ARE), a simple yet effective method that helps LLMs assess the necessity of retrieval without calibration or additional training.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.415
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6963–6975
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.415
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zihan Zhang, Meng Fang, and Ling Chen. 2024. RetrievalQA: Assessing Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Short-form Open-Domain Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 6963–6975, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RetrievalQA: Assessing Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Short-form Open-Domain Question Answering (Zhang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.415.pdf