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Baidu's Improving Retrieval Augmented Language Model with Self-Reasoning (arxiv.org)
66 points by a-s-k-af on Aug 1, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 4 comments on HN

In plain words: The model writes its reasoning steps to pick the retrieved documents that matter, choose the evidence, and check its path, so answers come with checkable citations. On four question-answering and fact-checking sets it beat the previous best systems and nearly matched GPT-4 with 2,000 training examples.

Abstract · Improving Retrieval Augmented Language Model with Self-Reasoning

The Retrieval-Augmented Language Model (RALM) has shown remarkable performance on knowledge-intensive tasks by incorporating external knowledge during inference, which mitigates the factual hallucinations inherited in large language models (LLMs). Despite these advancements, challenges persist in the implementation of RALMs, particularly concerning their reliability and traceability. To be specific, the irrelevant document retrieval may result in unhelpful response generation or even deteriorate the performance of LLMs, while the lack of proper citations in generated outputs complicates efforts to verify the trustworthiness of the models. To this end, we propose a novel self-reasoning framework aimed at improving the reliability and traceability of RALMs, whose core idea is to leverage reasoning trajectories generated by the LLM itself. The framework involves constructing self-reason trajectories with three processes: a relevance-aware process, an evidence-aware selective process, and a trajectory analysis process. We have evaluated our framework across four public datasets (two short-form QA datasets, one long-form QA dataset, and one fact verification dataset) to demonstrate the superiority of our method, which can outperform existing state-of-the-art models and can achieve comparable performance with GPT-4, while only using 2,000 training samples.

Yuan Xia, Jingbo Zhou, Zhenhui Shi, Jun Chen, Haifeng Huang
arXiv:2407.19813 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Jul 29, 2024 · updated Dec 19, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · AAAI 2025 (main conference)

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Can anyone explain what is gained by training a model? Why not use the foundational LLM for the relevance, evidence, and trajectory processes?
I assume you are referring to fine tuning a model here?
You could also just continue pre-training of an existing foundation model. Would still be cheaper by not starting from zero.
The amount of accuracy while doing fine tuning or distillation is usually better than pre-training an existing model, not to mention the graph against the cost.