CLaRa: Bridging Retrieval and Generation with Continuous Latent Reasoning
Authors: name: Jie He; name: Richard He Bai; name: Sinead Williamson; name: Jeff Z. Pan; name: Navdeep Jaitly; name: Yizhe Zhang
Published: 2025-11-24 00:11:14

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge but still suffers from long contexts and disjoint retrieval-generation optimization. In this work, we propose CLaRa (Continuous Latent Reasoning), a unified framework that performs embedding-based compression and joint optimization in a shared continuous space. To obtain semantically rich and retrievable compressed vectors, we introduce SCP, a key-preserving data synthesis framework using QA and paraphrase supervision. CLaRa then trains the reranker and generator end-to-end via a single language modeling loss, with gradients flowing through both modules using a differentiable top-k estimator. Theoretically, this unified optimization aligns retrieval relevance with answer quality. Experiments across multiple QA benchmarks show that CLaRa achieves state-of-the-art compression and reranking performance, often surpassing text-based fine-tuned baselines.