Optimizing Knowledge Integration in Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Self-Selection

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission2402 Authors

Abstract:

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which integrates external knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs), has proven effective in enabling LLMs to produce more accurate and reliable responses.
However, it remains a significant challenge how to effectively integrate external retrieved knowledge with internal parametric knowledge in LLMs.
In this work, we propose a novel Self-Selection RAG framework, where the LLM is made to select from pairwise responses generated with internal parametric knowledge solely and with external retrieved knowledge together to achieve enhanced accuracy.
To this end, we devise a Self-Selection-RGP method to enhance the capabilities of the LLM in both generating and selecting the correct answer, by training the LLM with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) over a curated Retrieval-Generation Preference (RGP) dataset.
Experimental results with two open-source LLMs (i.e., Llama2-13B-Chat and Mistral-7B) well demonstrate the superiority of our approach over other baseline methods on Natural Questions (NQ) and TrivialQA datasets.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Language Modeling

Research Area Keywords: retrieval-augmented generation, large language models, question answering

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 2402