Similarity is Not All You Need: Endowing Retrieval Augmented Generation
  with Multi Layered Thoughts
Authors: name: Chunjing Gan; name: Dan Yang; name: Binbin Hu; name: Hanxiao Zhang; name: Siyuan Li; name: Ziqi Liu; name: Yue Shen; name: Lin Ju; name: Zhiqiang Zhang; name: Jinjie Gu; name: Lei Liang; name: Jun Zhou
Published: 2024-05-30 09:50:38

Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable
achievements in various domains. However, the untimeliness and cost of
knowledge updates coupled with hallucination issues of LLMs have curtailed
their applications in knowledge intensive tasks, where retrieval augmented
generation (RAG) can be of help. Nevertheless, existing retrieval augmented
models typically use similarity as a bridge between queries and documents and
follow a retrieve then read procedure. In this work, we argue that similarity
is not always the panacea and totally relying on similarity would sometimes
degrade the performance of retrieval augmented generation. To this end, we
propose MetRag, a Multi layEred Thoughts enhanced Retrieval Augmented
Generation framework. To begin with, beyond existing similarity oriented
thought, we embrace a small scale utility model that draws supervision from an
LLM for utility oriented thought and further come up with a smarter model by
comprehensively combining the similarity and utility oriented thoughts.
Furthermore, given the fact that the retrieved document set tends to be huge
and using them in isolation makes it difficult to capture the commonalities and
characteristics among them, we propose to make an LLM as a task adaptive
summarizer to endow retrieval augmented generation with compactness-oriented
thought. Finally, with multi layered thoughts from the precedent stages, an LLM
is called for knowledge augmented generation. Extensive experiments on
knowledge-intensive tasks have demonstrated the superiority of MetRag.