RAFT: Adapting Language Model to Domain Specific RAG
Authors: name: Tianjun Zhang; name: Shishir G. Patil; name: Naman Jain; name: Sheng Shen; name: Matei Zaharia; name: Ion Stoica; name: Joseph E. Gonzalez
Published: 2024-03-15 09:26:02

Abstract: Pretraining Large Language Models (LLMs) on large corpora of textual data is
now a standard paradigm. When using these LLMs for many downstream
applications, it is common to additionally bake in new knowledge (e.g.,
time-critical news, or private domain knowledge) into the pretrained model
either through RAG-based-prompting, or fine-tuning. However, the optimal
methodology for the model to gain such new knowledge remains an open question.
In this paper, we present Retrieval Augmented FineTuning (RAFT), a training
recipe that improves the model's ability to answer questions in a "open-book"
in-domain settings. In RAFT, given a question, and a set of retrieved
documents, we train the model to ignore those documents that don't help in
answering the question, which we call, distractor documents. RAFT accomplishes
this by citing verbatim the right sequence from the relevant document that
would help answer the question. This coupled with RAFT's chain-of-thought-style
response helps improve the model's ability to reason. In domain-specific RAG,
RAFT consistently improves the model's performance across PubMed, HotpotQA, and
Gorilla datasets, presenting a post-training recipe to improve pre-trained LLMs
to in-domain RAG. RAFT's code and demo are open-sourced at
github.com/ShishirPatil/gorilla.