ChatQA: Surpassing GPT-4 on Conversational QA and RAG

In this work, we introduce ChatQA, a suite of models that outperform GPT-4 on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and conversational question answering (QA). To enhance generation, we propose a two-stage instruction tuning method that significantly boosts the performance of RAG. For effective retrieval, we introduce a dense retriever optimized for conversational QA, which yields results comparable to the alternative state-of-the-art query rewriting models, while substantially reducing deployment costs. We also present the ChatRAG Bench, which encompasses ten datasets covering comprehensive evaluations on RAG, table-related QA, arithmetic calculations, and scenarios involving unanswerable questions. These results demonstrate the exceptional quality of the proposed ChatQA recipe.