R2AG: Incorporating Retrieval Information into Retrieval Augmented Generation

Fuda Ye, Shuangyin Li, Yongqi Zhang, Lei Chen


Abstract
Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has been applied in many scenarios to augment large language models (LLMs) with external documents provided by retrievers. However, a semantic gap exists between LLMs and retrievers due to differences in their training objectives and architectures. This misalignment forces LLMs to passively accept the documents provided by the retrievers, leading to incomprehension in the generation process, where the LLMs are burdened with the task of distinguishing these documents using their inherent knowledge. This paper proposes R2AG, a novel enhanced RAG framework to fill this gap by incorporating **R**etrieval information into **R**etrieval **A**ugmented **G**eneration. Specifically, R2AG utilizes the nuanced features from the retrievers and employs a R2-Former to capture retrieval information. Then, a retrieval-aware prompting strategy is designed to integrate retrieval information into LLMs’ generation. Notably, R2AG suits low-source scenarios where LLMs and retrievers are frozen. Extensive experiments across five datasets validate the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of R2AG. Our analysis reveals that retrieval information serves as an anchor to aid LLMs in the generation process, thereby filling the semantic gap.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.678
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:
11584–11596
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.678
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fuda Ye, Shuangyin Li, Yongqi Zhang, and Lei Chen. 2024. R2AG: Incorporating Retrieval Information into Retrieval Augmented Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 11584–11596, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
R2AG: Incorporating Retrieval Information into Retrieval Augmented Generation (Ye et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.678.pdf