Generate rather than Retrieve: Large Language Models are Strong Context Generators
Knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-domain question answering (QA), require access to a large amount of world or domain knowledge. A common approach for knowledge-intensive tasks is to employ a retrieve-then-read pipeline that first retrieves a handful of relevant contextual documents from an external corpus such as Wikipedia and then predicts an answer conditioned on the retrieved documents. In this paper, we present a novel perspective for solving knowledge-intensive tasks by replacing document retrievers with large language model generators. We call our method generate-then-read (GenRead), which first prompts a large language model to generate contextutal documents based on a given question, and then reads the generated documents to produce the final answer. Furthermore, we propose a novel clustering-based prompting method that selects distinct prompts, resulting in the generated documents that cover different perspectives, leading to better recall over acceptable answers. We conduct extensive experiments on three different knowledge-intensive tasks, including open-domain QA, fact checking, and dialogue system. Notably, GenRead achieves 71.6 and 54.4 exact match scores on TriviaQA and WebQ, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art retrieve-then-read pipeline DPR-FiD by +4.0 and +3.9, without retrieving any documents from any external knowledge source. Lastly, we demonstrate the model performance can be further improved by combining retrieval and generation. Our code and generated documents can be found at https://github.com/wyu97/GenRead.
Code (2)
Tasks
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelOpen-Domain Question AnsweringSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
LLM-QE: Improving Query Expansion by Aligning Large Language Models with Ranking Preferences
Query expansion plays a crucial role in information retrieval, which aims to bridge the semantic gap between queries and documents to improve matching performance. This paper introduces LLM-QE, a novel approach that leve…
HallucinationInformation RetrievalRetrievalTraining-Induced Bias Toward LLM-Generated Content in Dense Retrieval
Dense retrieval is a promising approach for acquiring relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain natural language processing tasks and is now widely used in information retrieval applications. However, recent rep…
Information RetrievalNatural QuestionsCommunication breakdown: On the low mutual intelligibility between human and neural captioning
We compare the 0-shot performance of a neural caption-based image retriever when given as input either human-produced captions or captions generated by a neural captioner. We conduct this comparison on the recently intro…
RetrievalA Schema-Guided Reason-while-Retrieve framework for Reasoning on Scene Graphs with Large-Language-Models (LLMs)
Scene graphs have emerged as a structured and serializable environment representation for grounded spatial reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we propose SG-RwR, a Schema-Guided Retrieve-while-Reas…
HallucinationSpatial ReasoningTask PlanningRethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems
Reasoning-intensive retrieval aims to surface evidence that supports downstream reasoning rather than merely matching topical similarity. This capability is increasingly important for agentic search systems, where retrie…