Paper: Query Rewriting in Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models [pdf]
Large Language Models (LLMs) play powerful, black-box readers in the retrieve-then-read pipeline, making remarkable progress in knowledge-intensive tasks. This work introduces a new framework, Rewrite-Retrieve-Read instead of the previous retrieve-then-read for the retrieval-augmented LLMs from the perspective of the query rewriting. We first prompt an LLM to generate the query, then use a web search engine to retrieve contexts. Furthermore, to better align the query to the frozen modules, we propose a trainable scheme for our pipeline. A small language model is adopted as a trainable rewriter to cater to the black-box LLM reader. The rewriter is trained using the feedback of the LLM reader by reinforcement learning.
This repo will be improved continually.
- Add prompt lines (./generate/inprompts), example results (.examples).
- Add result models (./result_models).
Many thanks to
GenRead: Generate rather than retrieve: Large language models are strong context generators
ReAct: ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models
RL4LM: Is Reinforcement Learning (Not) for Natural Language Processing?: Benchmarks, Baselines, and Building Blocks for Natural Language Policy Optimization
@inproceedings{ma-etal-2023-query,
title = "Query Rewriting in Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models",
author = "Ma, Xinbei and
Gong, Yeyun and
He, Pengcheng and
Zhao, Hai and
Duan, Nan",
editor = "Bouamor, Houda and
Pino, Juan and
Bali, Kalika",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = dec,
year = "2023",
address = "Singapore",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.322",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.322",
pages = "5303--5315",
abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) play powerful, black-box readers in the retrieve-then-read pipeline, making remarkable progress in knowledge-intensive tasks. This work introduces a new framework, Rewrite-Retrieve-Read instead of the previous retrieve-then-read for the retrieval-augmented LLMs from the perspective of the query rewriting. Unlike prior studies focusing on adapting either the retriever or the reader, our approach pays attention to the adaptation of the search query itself, for there is inevitably a gap between the input text and the needed knowledge in retrieval. We first prompt an LLM to generate the query, then use a web search engine to retrieve contexts. Furthermore, to better align the query to the frozen modules, we propose a trainable scheme for our pipeline. A small language model is adopted as a trainable rewriter to cater to the black-box LLM reader. The rewriter is trained using the feedback of the LLM reader by reinforcement learning. Evaluation is conducted on downstream tasks, open-domain QA and multiple-choice QA. Experiments results show consistent performance improvement, indicating that our framework is proven effective and scalable, and brings a new framework for retrieval-augmented LLM.",
}