LLMMay 22, 2020Meta AI / UCL / NYU

Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks

Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandra Piktus, Fabio Petroni, Vladimir Karpukhin, Naman Goyal, Heinrich Kuttler, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Tim Rocktaschel, Sebastian Riedel, Douwe Kiela

Abstract

Large pre-trained language models have been shown to store factual knowledge in their parameters. However, their ability to access and precisely manipulate knowledge is still limited. We explore a general-purpose fine-tuning recipe for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — models which combine pre-trained parametric and non-parametric memory for language generation.

Key Findings

  • 1Introduced RAG architecture combining retrieval with generation
  • 2Demonstrated improved factual accuracy by grounding generation in retrieved documents
  • 3Showed state-of-the-art results on open-domain question answering
  • 4Enabled models to access up-to-date information beyond training data
  • 5Provided a framework for knowledge-grounded text generation

Impact & Significance

RAG became the dominant pattern for building production AI applications that need accurate, up-to-date information. It is now the standard approach for enterprise AI, customer support bots, and knowledge management systems.

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