TrustRAG: An Information Assistant with Retrieval Augmented Generation

\Ac{RAG} has emerged as a crucial technique for enhancing large models with real-time and domain-specific knowledge. While numerous improvements and open-source tools have been proposed to refine the \ac{RAG} framework for accuracy, relatively little attention has been given to improving the trustworthiness of generated results. To address this gap, we introduce TrustRAG, a novel framework that enhances \ac{RAG} from three perspectives: indexing, retrieval, and generation. Specifically, in the indexing stage, we propose a semantic-enhanced chunking strategy that incorporates hierarchical indexing to supplement each chunk with contextual information, ensuring semantic completeness. In the retrieval stage, we introduce a utility-based filtering mechanism to identify high-quality information, supporting answer generation while reducing input length. In the generation stage, we propose fine-grained citation enhancement, which detects opinion-bearing sentences in responses and infers citation relationships at the sentence-level, thereby improving citation accuracy. We open-source the TrustRAG framework and provide a demonstration studio designed for excerpt-based question answering tasks \footnote{https://huggingface.co/spaces/golaxy/TrustRAG}. Based on these, we aim to help researchers: 1) systematically enhancing the trustworthiness of \ac{RAG} systems and (2) developing their own \ac{RAG} systems with more reliable outputs.

Generative Retrieval for Book search

In book search, relevant book information should be returned in response to a query. Books contain complex, multi-faceted information such as metadata, outlines, and main text, where the outline provides hierarchical information between chapters and sections. Generative retrieval (GR) is a new retrieval paradigm that consolidates corpus information into a single model to generate identifiers of documents that are relevant to a given query. How can GR be applied to book search? Directly applying GR to book search is a challenge due to the unique characteristics of book search: The model needs to retain the complex, multi-faceted information of the book, which increases the demand for labeled data. Splitting book information and treating it as a collection of separate segments for learning might result in a loss of hierarchical information. We propose an effective Generative retrieval framework for Book Search (GBS) that features two main components: data augmentation and outline-oriented book encoding. For data augmentation, GBS constructs multiple query-book pairs for training; it constructs multiple book identifiers based on the outline, various forms of book contents, and simulates real book retrieval scenarios with varied pseudo-queries. This includes coverage-promoting book identifier augmentation, allowing the model to learn to index effectively, and diversity-enhanced query augmentation, allowing the model to learn to retrieve effectively. Outline-oriented book encoding improves length extrapolation through bi-level positional encoding and retentive attention mechanisms to maintain context over long sequences. Experiments on a proprietary Baidu dataset demonstrate that GBS outperforms strong baselines, achieving a 9.8\% improvement in terms of MRR@20, over the state-of-the-art RIPOR method...

On the Robustness of Generative Information Retrieval Models

Generative information retrieval methods retrieve documents by directly generating their identifiers. Much effort has been devoted to developing effective generative IR models. Less attention has been paid to the robustness of these models. It is critical to assess the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of generative IR models, i.e., how would such models generalize to new distributions? To answer this question, we focus on OOD scenarios from four perspectives in retrieval problems: (i)query variations; (ii)unseen query types; (iii)unseen tasks; and (iv)corpus expansion. Based on this taxonomy, we conduct empirical studies to analyze the OOD robustness of representative generative IR models against dense retrieval models. Our empirical results indicate that the OOD robustness of generative IR models is in need of improvement. By inspecting the OOD robustness of generative IR models we aim to contribute to the development of more reliable IR models. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Davion-Liu/GR_OOD}.

Attack-in-the-Chain: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for Attacks Against Black-box Neural Ranking Models

Neural ranking models (NRMs) have been shown to be highly effective in terms of retrieval performance. Unfortunately, they have also displayed a higher degree of sensitivity to attacks than previous generation models. To help expose and address this lack of robustness, we introduce a novel ranking attack framework named Attack-in-the-Chain, which tracks interactions between large language models (LLMs) and NRMs based on chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to generate adversarial examples under black-box settings. Our approach starts by identifying anchor documents with higher ranking positions than the target document as nodes in the reasoning chain. We then dynamically assign the number of perturbation words to each node and prompt LLMs to execute attacks. Finally, we verify the attack performance of all nodes at each reasoning step and proceed to generate the next reasoning step. Empirical results on two web search benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method.

A Claim Decomposition Benchmark for Long-form Answer Verification

The advancement of LLMs has significantly boosted the performance of complex long-form question answering tasks. However, one prominent issue of LLMs is the generated "hallucination" responses that are not factual. Consequently, attribution for each claim in responses becomes a common solution to improve the factuality and verifiability. Existing researches mainly focus on how to provide accurate citations for the response, which largely overlook the importance of identifying the claims or statements for each response. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new claim decomposition benchmark, which requires building system that can identify atomic and checkworthy claims for LLM responses. Specifically, we present the Chinese Atomic Claim Decomposition Dataset (CACDD), which builds on the WebCPM dataset with additional expert annotations to ensure high data quality. The CACDD encompasses a collection of 500 human-annotated question-answer pairs, including a total of 4956 atomic claims. We further propose a new pipeline for human annotation and describe the challenges of this task. In addition, we provide experiment results on zero-shot, few-shot and fine-tuned LLMs as baselines. The results show that the claim decomposition is highly challenging and requires further explorations. All code and data are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/FBzzh/CACDD}.

On the Capacity of Citation Generation by Large Language Models

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) appears as a promising method to alleviate the "hallucination" problem in large language models (LLMs), since it can incorporate external traceable resources for response generation. The essence of RAG in combating the hallucination issue lies in accurately attributing claims in responses to the corresponding retrieved documents. However, most of existing works focus on improving the quality of generated responses from the LLM, while largely overlooked its ability to attribute sources accurately. In this study, we conduct a systematic analysis about the capabilities of LLMs in generating citations within response generation, and further introduce a novel method to enhance their citation generation abilities. Specifically, we evaluate both the correctness and citation quality for seven widely-used LLMs on two benchmark datasets. Meanwhile, we introduce new citation evaluation metrics to eliminate the over-penalization of unnecessary and excessive citations in existing metrics. Furthermore, we propose a Generate-then-Refine method that completes relevant citations and removes irrelevant ones without altering the response text. The results on WebGLM-QA, ASQA and ELI5 datasets show that our method substantially improves the quality of citations in responses generated by LLMs.

Generative Retrieval Meets Multi-Graded Relevance

Generative retrieval represents a novel approach to information retrieval. It uses an encoder-decoder architecture to directly produce relevant document identifiers (docids) for queries. While this method offers benefits, current approaches are limited to scenarios with binary relevance data, overlooking the potential for documents to have multi-graded relevance. Extending generative retrieval to accommodate multi-graded relevance poses challenges, including the need to reconcile likelihood probabilities for docid pairs and the possibility of multiple relevant documents sharing the same identifier. To address these challenges, we introduce a framework called GRaded Generative Retrieval (GR$^2$). GR$^2$ focuses on two key components: ensuring relevant and distinct identifiers, and implementing multi-graded constrained contrastive training. First, we create identifiers that are both semantically relevant and sufficiently distinct to represent individual documents effectively. This is achieved by jointly optimizing the relevance and distinctness of docids through a combination of docid generation and autoencoder models. Second, we incorporate information about the relationship between relevance grades to guide the training process. We use a constrained contrastive training strategy to bring the representations of queries and the identifiers of their relevant documents closer together, based on their respective relevance grades. Extensive experiments on datasets with both multi-graded and binary relevance demonstrate the effectiveness of GR$^2$.

Controlling Risk of Retrieval-augmented Generation: A Counterfactual Prompting Framework

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a popular solution to mitigate the hallucination issues of large language models. However, existing studies on RAG seldom address the issue of predictive uncertainty, i.e., how likely it is that a RAG model's prediction is incorrect, resulting in uncontrollable risks in real-world applications. In this work, we emphasize the importance of risk control, ensuring that RAG models proactively refuse to answer questions with low confidence. Our research identifies two critical latent factors affecting RAG's confidence in its predictions: the quality of the retrieved results and the manner in which these results are utilized. To guide RAG models in assessing their own confidence based on these two latent factors, we develop a counterfactual prompting framework that induces the models to alter these factors and analyzes the effect on their answers. We also introduce a benchmarking procedure to collect answers with the option to abstain, facilitating a series of experiments. For evaluation, we introduce several risk-related metrics and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Bootstrapped Pre-training with Dynamic Identifier Prediction for Generative Retrieval

Generative retrieval uses differentiable search indexes to directly generate relevant document identifiers in response to a query. Recent studies have highlighted the potential of a strong generative retrieval model, trained with carefully crafted pre-training tasks, to enhance downstream retrieval tasks via fine-tuning. However, the full power of pre-training for generative retrieval remains underexploited due to its reliance on pre-defined static document identifiers, which may not align with evolving model parameters. In this work, we introduce BootRet, a bootstrapped pre-training method for generative retrieval that dynamically adjusts document identifiers during pre-training to accommodate the continuing memorization of the corpus. BootRet involves three key training phases: (i) initial identifier generation, (ii) pre-training via corpus indexing and relevance prediction tasks, and (iii) bootstrapping for identifier updates. To facilitate the pre-training phase, we further introduce noisy documents and pseudo-queries, generated by large language models, to resemble semantic connections in both indexing and retrieval tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that BootRet significantly outperforms existing pre-training generative retrieval baselines and performs well even in zero-shot settings.

Robust Neural Information Retrieval: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspective

Recent advances in neural information retrieval (IR) models have significantly enhanced their effectiveness over various IR tasks. The robustness of these models, essential for ensuring their reliability in practice, has also garnered significant attention. With a wide array of research on robust IR being proposed, we believe it is the opportune moment to consolidate the current status, glean insights from existing methodologies, and lay the groundwork for future development. We view the robustness of IR to be a multifaceted concept, emphasizing its necessity against adversarial attacks, out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios and performance variance. With a focus on adversarial and OOD robustness, we dissect robustness solutions for dense retrieval models (DRMs) and neural ranking models (NRMs), respectively, recognizing them as pivotal components of the neural IR pipeline. We provide an in-depth discussion of existing methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics, shedding light on challenges and future directions in the era of large language models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey on the robustness of neural IR models, and we will also be giving our first tutorial presentation at SIGIR 2024 \url{https://sigir2024-robust-information-retrieval.github.io}. Along with the organization of existing work, we introduce a Benchmark for robust IR (BestIR), a heterogeneous evaluation benchmark for robust neural information retrieval, which is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Davion-Liu/BestIR}. We hope that this study provides useful clues for future research on the robustness of IR models and helps to develop trustworthy search engines \url{https://github.com/Davion-Liu/Awesome-Robustness-in-Information-Retrieval}.