RAG-Instruct: Boosting LLMs with Diverse Retrieval-Augmented Instructions

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission4993 Authors

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key paradigm for enhancing large language models by incorporating external knowledge. However, current RAG methods exhibit limited capabilities in complex RAG scenarios and suffer from limited task diversity. To address these limitations, we propose RAG-Instruct, a general method for synthesizing diverse and high-quality RAG instruction data based on any source corpus. Our approach leverages (1) five RAG paradigms, which encompass diverse query-document relationships, and (2) instruction simulation, which enhances instruction diversity and quality by utilizing the strengths of existing instruction datasets. Using this method, we construct a 40K instruction dataset from Wikipedia, comprehensively covering diverse RAG scenarios and tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RAG-Instruct effectively enhances LLMs' RAG capabilities, achieving strong zero-shot performance and significantly outperforming various RAG baselines across a diverse set of tasks.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Information Retrieval and Text Mining

Research Area Keywords: Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Information Retrieval, Large Language Model

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Data resources

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 4993