RetroLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Retrieve Fine-grained
  Evidence within Generation
Authors: name: Xiaoxi Li; name: Jiajie Jin; name: Yujia Zhou; name: Yongkang Wu; name: Zhonghua Li; name: Qi Ye; name: Zhicheng Dou
Published: 2024-12-16 16:03:25

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable generative capabilities but
often suffer from hallucinations. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers
an effective solution by incorporating external knowledge, but existing methods
still face several limitations: additional deployment costs of separate
retrievers, redundant input tokens from retrieved text chunks, and the lack of
joint optimization of retrieval and generation. To address these issues, we
propose RetroLLM, a unified framework that integrates retrieval and
generation into a single, cohesive process, enabling LLMs to directly generate
fine-grained evidence from the corpus with constrained decoding. Moreover, to
mitigate false pruning in the process of constrained evidence generation, we
introduce (1) hierarchical FM-Index constraints, which generate
corpus-constrained clues to identify a subset of relevant documents before
evidence generation, reducing irrelevant decoding space; and (2) a
forward-looking constrained decoding strategy, which considers the relevance of
future sequences to improve evidence accuracy. Extensive experiments on five
open-domain QA datasets demonstrate RetroLLM's superior performance across both
in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. The code is available at
https://github.com/sunnynexus/RetroLLM.