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  • Continuum
  • Data
    • Datasets
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      • Systematic Evaluation of Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models on Open Datasets
      • Instruction Tuning
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      • Less is More For Alignment
      • Enhanced Supervised Fine Tuning
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      • Training and Evaluation Datasets
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  • MODELS
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      • Analysis of Llama 3
      • Llama 3.1 series
      • Google Gemini 1.5
      • Platypus: Quick, Cheap, and Powerful Refinement of LLMs
      • Mixtral of Experts
      • Mixture-of-Agents (MoA)
      • Phi 1.5
        • Refining the Art of AI Training: A Deep Dive into Phi 1.5's Innovative Approach
      • Phi 2.0
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  • Training
    • The Fine Tuning Process
      • Why fine tune?
        • Does Fine-Tuning LLMs on New Knowledge Encourage Hallucinations?
        • Explanations in Fine Tuning
      • Tokenization
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        • Tokenizer Choice For LLM Training: Negligible or Crucial?
        • Getting the most out of your tokenizer for pre-training and domain adaptation
        • TokenMonster
      • Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning
        • P-Tuning
          • The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning
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        • Harnessing the Power of PEFT: A Smarter Approach to Fine-tuning Pre-trained Models
        • What is Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) - explained by the inventor
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        • The quantization constant
        • QLORA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized Language Models
        • QLORA and Fine-Tuning of Quantized Language Models (LMs)
        • ReLoRA: High-Rank Training Through Low-Rank Updates
        • SLoRA: Federated Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Language Models
        • GaLora: Memory-Efficient LLM Training by Gradient Low-Rank Projection
      • Hyperparameters
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  • INFERENCE
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      • SLORA
  • KNOWLEDGE
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      • Using the Output Embedding to Improve Language Models
      • Decoding Sentence-BERT
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      • Vector Databases are not the only solution
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        • Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap
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      • Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey
      • Fine-Tuning or Retrieval?
      • Revolutionising Information Retrieval: The Power of RAG in Language Models
      • A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation
      • REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training
      • Retrieve Anything To Augment Large Language Models
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      • DSPy: LM Assertions: Enhancing Language Model Pipelines with Computational Constraints
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      • HYDE: Revolutionising Search with Hypothetical Document Embeddings
      • Enhancing Recommender Systems with Large Language Model Reasoning Graphs
      • Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) versus fine tuning
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      • Stanford: Retrieval Augmented Language Models
      • Overview of RAG Approaches with Vector Databases
      • Mastering Chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems
    • Semantic Routing
    • Resource Description Framework (RDF)
  • AGENTS
    • What is agency?
      • Rephrase and Respond: Let Large Language Models Ask Better Questions for Themselves
      • Types of Agents
      • The risk of AI agency
      • Understanding Personality in Large Language Models: A New Frontier in AI Psychology
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      • Personality and Brand
      • Agent Interaction via APIs
      • Bridging Minds and Machines: The Legacy of Newell, Shaw, and Simon
      • A Survey on Language Model based Autonomous Agents
      • Large Language Models as Agents
      • AI Reasoning: A Deep Dive into Chain-of-Thought Prompting
      • Enhancing AI Reasoning with Self-Taught Reasoner (STaR)
      • Exploring the Frontier of AI: The "Tree of Thoughts" Framework
      • Toolformer: Revolutionising Language Models with API Integration - An Analysis
      • TaskMatrix.AI: Bridging Foundational AI Models with Specialised Systems for Enhanced Task Completion
      • Unleashing the Power of LLMs in API Integration: The Rise of Gorilla
      • Andrew Ng's presentation on AI agents
      • Making AI accessible with Andrej Karpathy and Stephanie Zhan
  • Regulation and Ethics
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      • Navigating the IP Maze in AI: The Convergence of Blockchain, Web 3.0, and LLMs
      • Adverse Reactions to generative AI
      • Navigating the Ethical Minefield: The Challenge of Security in Large Language Models
      • Navigating the Uncharted Waters: The Risks of Autonomous AI in Military Decision-Making
  • DISRUPTION
    • Data Architecture
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      • What is Reverse ETL?
      • Unstructured Data and Generatve AI
      • Resource Description Framework (RDF)
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      • FOLLOWIR: Evaluating and Teaching Information Retrieval Models to Follow Instructions
      • Neural Collaborative Filtering
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      • Latent Space versus Embedding Space
      • Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models
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      • On Interpretation and Measurement of Soft Attributes for Recommendation
      • A Survey on Large Language Models for Recommendation
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      • Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations
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      • Deep Learning for Anomaly Detection in Log Data: A Survey
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      • Introduction to NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage (GDS)
        • GDS cuFile API
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On this page
  • Formulation and key components
  • Challenges and methodologies in dialogue response generation

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  1. KNOWLEDGE
  2. Retrieval Augmented Generation

A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation

Huayang Li, Yixuan Su, Deng Cai, Yan Wang, Lemao Liu

PreviousRevolutionising Information Retrieval: The Power of RAG in Language ModelsNextREALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training

Last updated 1 year ago

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This February 2022 paper provides a survey on the topic of retrieval-augmented text generation, a technique that combines deep learning with traditional retrieval methods to increase the performance and utility of large language model applications.

The approach has demonstrated superior performance by leveraging existing human-written texts or other external knowledge sources to guide the generation process, enhancing both the quality and relevance of the generated content.

Formulation and key components

Formulation

Retrieval-augmented text generation is described as an approach where the model, besides the usual input sequence (x), also leverages an additional set of relevant instances (z) retrieved from training sets or external data sources.

This extra layer of information (z) aims to enrich the model's output (y), enhancing the generation process's relevance and accuracy.

Retrieval Sources

  • Training Corpus: The model retrieves relevant examples from its training data, using these instances as references to guide the generation process and reduce uncertainty.

  • External Data: Using external datasets provides additional, potentially uncontained information in the training set, aiding in scenarios like domain adaptation or updating the model's knowledge base.

  • Unsupervised Data: Particularly in machine translation, the approach involves retrieving target language sentences directly from unsupervised (monolingual) corpora, aligning source and target data in a dense vector space to enhance translation accuracy without relying on parallel text pairs.

Retrieval Metrics

  • Sparse-vector Retrieval: Techniques like TF-IDF and BM25, which rely on keyword matching, are used to fetch relevant instances based on lexical similarities.

  • Dense-vector Retrieval: This method retrieves semantically relevant instances, not just lexically similar ones, by representing text in dense vectors and computing retrieval scores through vector inner products.

  • Task-specific Retrieval: Rather than just relying on generic textual similarity, some methods optimise retrieval metrics for specific tasks, ensuring the retrieved content genuinely enhances the generation outcome.

Integration Methods

  • Data Augmentation: The retrieved content is combined with the original input to create augmented training instances, helping the model learn to utilize the retrieved information effectively.

  • Attention Mechanisms: Leveraging attention mechanisms allows the model to focus on and integrate useful information from the retrieved content, enhancing the generation process.

  • Skeleton Extraction: This approach involves extracting and integrating only the most relevant portions of the retrieved content, allowing the model to focus on useful information while discarding the irrelevant.

Challenges and methodologies in dialogue response generation

Dialogue Systems Classification

  • Task-Oriented Systems: These are designed to accomplish specific user tasks, like booking tickets.

  • Chit-Chat Systems: Aim to generate engaging and relevant responses without a fixed objective, facing the one-to-many problem where multiple responses can be suitable for a single dialogue history.

Dialogue Response Generation Models

  • Retrieval-Based Models: These models fetch an existing response from a dataset, ensuring informativeness and grammatical correctness. However, they struggle with unique dialogue histories not present in the dataset.

  • Generation-Based Models: Capable of generating new responses, these models offer better generalisation but often produce generic and less informative replies.

Integration Approaches

  • Shallow Integration: Early attempts combined retrieval and generation-based outputs, aiming to leverage the strengths of both. For instance, re-ranking outputs from both models was one such technique.

  • Deep Integration: More sophisticated methods integrate retrieval results directly into the generation process. For example, some models use an additional encoder for the retrieval result or construct an edit vector to account for context differences between the dialogue history and the retrieved response. This approach aims to refine the generation process by incorporating relevant retrieved content.

Knowledge-Enhanced Generation

  • Retrieval-augmented dialogue systems can also leverage external knowledge sources, not just dialogue corpora, to enrich responses. This inclusion of varied knowledge forms aims to produce more grounded and contextually appropriate responses.

Limitations and Future Directions

  • The current dialogue response generation frameworks typically use a single retrieved response, potentially limiting the response's richness. Future research could explore integrating multiple retrieval responses.

  • Customised retrieval metrics could offer more tailored and relevant responses, especially for generating responses with specific characteristics like persona or emotion.

  • Expanding the retrieval pool beyond dialogue corpora to include diverse domains or modalities could provide a broader context and enhance the response generation process.

LogoA Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Text GenerationarXiv.org
A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation
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