BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domain

Kaisi Guan, Qian Cao, Yuchong Sun, Xiting Wang, Ruihua Song


Abstract
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system is important in domains such as e-commerce, which has many long-tail entities and frequently updated information. Most existing works adopt separate modules for retrieval and generation, which may be suboptimal since the retrieval task and the generation task cannot benefit from each other to improve performance. We propose a novel Backbone Shared RAG framework (BSharedRAG). It first uses a domain-specific corpus to continually pre-train a base model as a domain-specific backbone model and then trains two plug-and-play Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules based on the shared backbone to minimize retrieval and generation losses respectively. Experimental results indicate that our proposed BSharedRAG outperforms baseline models by 5% and 13% in Hit@3 upon two datasets in retrieval evaluation and by 23% in terms of BLEU-3 in generation evaluation. Our codes, models, and dataset are available at https://bsharedrag.github.io.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.62
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1137–1158
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.62
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kaisi Guan, Qian Cao, Yuchong Sun, Xiting Wang, and Ruihua Song. 2024. BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domain. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 1137–1158, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domain (Guan et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.62.pdf