Chain-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation
Authors: name: Liang Wang; name: Haonan Chen; name: Nan Yang; name: Xiaolong Huang; name: Zhicheng Dou; name: Furu Wei
Published: 2025-01-24 09:12:52

Abstract: This paper introduces an approach for training o1-like RAG models that
retrieve and reason over relevant information step by step before generating
the final answer. Conventional RAG methods usually perform a single retrieval
step before the generation process, which limits their effectiveness in
addressing complex queries due to imperfect retrieval results. In contrast, our
proposed method, CoRAG (Chain-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation), allows the
model to dynamically reformulate the query based on the evolving state. To
train CoRAG effectively, we utilize rejection sampling to automatically
generate intermediate retrieval chains, thereby augmenting existing RAG
datasets that only provide the correct final answer. At test time, we propose
various decoding strategies to scale the model's test-time compute by
controlling the length and number of sampled retrieval chains. Experimental
results across multiple benchmarks validate the efficacy of CoRAG, particularly
in multi-hop question answering tasks, where we observe more than 10 points
improvement in EM score compared to strong baselines. On the KILT benchmark,
CoRAG establishes a new state-of-the-art performance across a diverse range of
knowledge-intensive tasks. Furthermore, we offer comprehensive analyses to
understand the scaling behavior of CoRAG, laying the groundwork for future
research aimed at developing factual and grounded foundation models.