Goto

Collaborating Authors

 retriever


Cooperative Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Question Answering: Mutual Information Exchange and Ranking by Contrasting Layers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Since large language models (LLMs) have a tendency to generate factually inaccurate output, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has gained significant attention as a key means to mitigate this downside of harnessing only LLMs. However, existing RAG methods for simple and multi-hop question answering (QA) are still prone to incorrect retrievals and hallucinations. To address these limitations, we propose CoopRAG, a novel RAG framework for the QA task in which a retriever and an LLM work cooperatively with each other by exchanging informative knowledge, and the earlier and later layers of the retriever model work cooperatively with each other to accurately rank the retrieved documents relevant to a given query. In this framework, we (i) unroll a question into sub-questions and a reasoning chain in which uncertain positions are masked, (ii) retrieve the documents relevant to the question augmented with the sub-questions and the reasoning chain, (iii) rerank the documents by contrasting layers of the retriever, and (iv) reconstruct the reasoning chain by filling the masked positions via the LLM. Our experiments demonstrate that CoopRAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art QA methods on three multi-hop QA datasets as well as a simple QA dataset in terms of both the retrieval and QA performances.


Learningto Rank for In-Context Example Retrieval

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in retrieval-based in-context learning (ICL) train the retriever using a classification objective, which categorizes in-context examples (ICEs) into the most useful and the rest based on absolute scores. However, during inference, ICEs are retrieved by score ranking rather than classification -- The classification training objective deviates from this test scenario. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that trains a retrieval model by ranking formulation, where the preference rankings between ICEs are given by comparing the likelihood of the LLM generating the correct answer conditioned on each exemplar. By learning to rank, we motivate the retriever to automatically learn diverse rationales why specific examples are more useful for ICL decisions. This addresses the issue that classification models poorly capture broader utility. Experimental results demonstrate the top-1 performance of our proposal across 9 NLP tasks, with ablation studies and case studies further validating the effectiveness of our design.


Interactive Cross-modal Learning for Text-3DScene Retrieval

Neural Information Processing Systems

Text-3DScene Retrieval (T3SR) aims to retrieve relevant scenes using linguistic queries. Although traditional T3SR methods have made significant progress in capturing fine-grained associations, they implicitly assume that query descriptions are information-complete. In practical deployments, however, limited by the capabilities of users and models, it is difficult or even impossible to directly obtain a perfect textual query suiting the entire scene and model, thereby leading to performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose a novel Interactive Text-3D Scene Retrieval Method (IDeal), which promotes the enhancement of the alignment between texts and 3D scenes through continuous interaction. To achieve this, we present an Interactive Retrieval Refinement framework (IRR), which employs a questioner to pose contextually relevant questions to an answerer in successive rounds that either promote detailed probing or encourage exploratory divergence within scenes. Upon the iterative responses received from the answerer, IRR adopts a retriever to perform both feature-level and semantic-level information fusion, facilitating scene-level interaction and understanding for more precise re-rankings. To bridge the domain gap between queries and interactive texts, we propose an Interaction Adaptation Tuning strategy (IAT).


Direct Natural Language Querying to Massive Heterogeneous Semi Structured Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Searching over semi-structured data with natural language (NL) queries has attracted sustained attention, enabling broader audiences to access information easily. As more applications, such as LLM agents and RAG systems, emerge to search and interact with semi-structured data, two major challenges have become evident: (1) the increasing diversity of domains and schema variations, making domain-customized solutions prohibitively costly; (2) the growing complexity of NL queries, which combine both exact field matching conditions and fuzzy semantic requirements, often involving multiple fields and implicit reasoning. These challenges make formal language querying or keyword-based search insufficient. In this work, we explore neural retrievers as a unified non-formal querying solution by directly index semi-structured collections and understand NL queries. We employ LLM-based automatic evaluation and build a large-scale semi-structured retrieval benchmark (SSRB) using LLM generation and filtering, containing 14M semi-structured objects from 99 different schemas across 6 domains, along with 8,485 test queries that combine both exact and fuzzy matching conditions. Our systematic evaluation of popular retrievers shows that current state-of-the-art models could achieve acceptable performance, yet they still lack precise understanding of matching constraints. While by in-domain training of dense retrievers, the performance can be significantly improved. We believe that our SSRBcould serve as a valuable resource for future research in this area, and we hope to inspire further exploration of semi-structured retrieval with complex queries.


REGen: Multimodal Retrieval-Embedded Generation for Long-to-Short Video Editing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Short videos are an effective tool for promoting contents and improving knowledge accessibility. While existing extractive video summarization methods struggle to produce a coherent narrative, existing abstractive methods cannot'quote' from the input videos, i.e., inserting short video clips in their outputs. In this work, we explore new video editing models for generating shorts that feature a coherent narrative with embedded video insertions extracted from a long input video. We propose a novel retrieval-embedded generation (REG) framework that allows a large language model to quote multimodal resources while maintaining a coherent narrative. Our proposed REGen system first generates the output story script with quote placeholders using a finetuned large language model, and then uses a multimodal retrieval model to replace the quote placeholders by selecting a video clip that best supports the narrative from a pool of candidate quotable video clips. We examine the proposed method on the task of documentary teaser generation, where short interview insertions are commonly used to support the narrative of a documentary. Our objective evaluations show that the proposed method can effectively insert short video clips while maintaining a coherent narrative. In a subjective survey, we show that our proposed method outperforms existing abstractive and extractive approaches in terms of coherence, alignment, and realism in documentary teaser generation.


Optimizing Retrieval for RAG via Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

As retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) becomes more widespread, the role of retrieval is shifting from retrieving information for human browsing to retrieving context for AI reasoning. This shift creates more complex search environments, where relevance is difficult to pre-define. Existing retrievers rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with human labels or synthetic data, resulting in static relevance that struggles to adapt to diverse RAG environments. To address this challenge, we propose R3, a Retrieval framework optimized for RAG through Reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we adopt an RL training paradigm that enables the retriever to explore and self-improve within given RAG environments, automating the learning process with minimal manual experimentation or tuning effort. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that R3 improves RAG performance by 5.2% over the original retriever and surpasses state-of-the-art retrievers by 4.9%, while achieving comparable results to LLM-augmented retrieval and RAG systems built on post-trained or instruction-tuned LLMs. It is both efficient and practical, requiring only 4 GPUs and completing training within a single day.


GFM-RAG: Graph Foundation Model for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective in integrating knowledge into large language models (LLMs). However, conventional RAGs struggle to capture complex relationships between pieces of knowledge, limiting their performance in intricate reasoning that requires integrating knowledge from multiple sources. Recently, graph-enhanced retrieval augmented generation (GraphRAG) builds graph structure to explicitly model these relationships, enabling more effective and efficient retrievers. Nevertheless, its performance is still hindered by the noise and incompleteness within the graph structure. To address this, we introduce GFM-RAG, a novel graph foundation model (GFM) for retrieval augmented generation. GFM-RAG is powered by an innovative graph neural network that reasons over graph structure to capture complex query-knowledge relationships.



Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Generation for Document Question Answering

Neural Information Processing Systems

Current document retrieval-augmented generation (DocRAG) Therefore, the number of female respondents who never listened to theradio is: Number of females who never listened = 2,001 * 0.557 = 1,115 methods remain limited by their text-centric approaches, frequently missing "text12": [ "The table provides a


Learning to Rank for In-Context Example Retrieval

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in retrieval-based in-context learning (ICL) train the retriever using a classification objective, which categorizes in-context examples (ICEs) into the most useful and the rest based on absolute scores. However, during inference, ICEs are retrieved by score ranking rather than classification -- The classification training objective deviates from this test scenario. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that trains a retrieval model by ranking formulation, where the preference rankings between ICEs are given by comparing the likelihood of the LLM generating the correct answer conditioned on each exemplar. By learning to rank, we motivate the retriever to automatically learn diverse rationales why specific examples are more useful for ICL decisions. This addresses the issue that classification models poorly capture broader utility. Experimental results demonstrate the top-1 performance of our proposal across 9 NLP tasks, with ablation studies and case studies further validating the effectiveness of our design.