Challenge: Prior work on retrieval augmentation fine-tuned the retriever and the LM, making them closely coupled.
Approach: They propose a generic retrieval plug-in that can be used to fine-tune retrieval augmentation and a LM to learn a user's preferences.
Outcome: The proposed retriever improves the generalization of large language models on the MMLU and PopQA datasets by learning LM’s preferences from a known source LM .

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Challenge: Using mixture-of-memory augmenting to augment language models improves model generalization but with diminishing return.
Approach: They develop a mechanism that augments language models with mixture-of-memory Augmentation (MoMA) they augment strong T5-based retrievers with the option to "plug in" unseen memory at inference time.
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Retrieval-Augmented Retrieval: Large Language Models are Strong Zero-Shot Retriever (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large-scale retrieval is indispensable in information-seeking tasks such as open-domain question answering and knowledgegrounded dialogue.
Approach: They propose to use a large language model (LLM) to augment a query with its potential answers by prompting LLMs with a composition of the query and the query’s in-domain candidates.
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On Retrieval Augmentation and the Limitations of Language Model Training (2024.naacl-short)

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Challenge: Recent efforts to improve the performance of language models (LMs) have focused on scaling up model and training data size, though with steep accompanying energy and compute resource costs.
Approach: They propose to augment a language model with k-nearest neighbors retrieval on its training data to reduce its perplexity.
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Retrieval Helps or Hurts? A Deeper Dive into the Efficacy of Retrieval Augmentation to Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LMs) excel in retrieving popular facts, but encounter difficulty with infrequent entity-relation pairs compared to retrievers.
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ARL2: Aligning Retrievers with Black-box Large Language Models via Self-guided Adaptive Relevance Labeling (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing retrievers are misaligned with large language models due to separate training processes and inherent black-box nature of LLMs.
Approach: They propose a retriever learning technique that harnesses LLMs as labelers to annotate and score adaptive relevance evidence.
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REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing retrieval-augmented language models require access to internal representations to enhance performance.
Approach: They introduce a retrieval-augmented language modeling framework that treats the language model as a black box and augments it with a tuneable retrieval model.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance on language modeling tasks by 6.3% and 5.1%.
Embedding-Informed Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented large language models excel in various NLP tasks but are not always helpful when the knowledge required is absent in the model.
Approach: They propose to determine whether the model is knowledgeable on a query via inspecting the (contextualized) pre-trained token embeddings of LLMs.
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Self-Knowledge Guided Retrieval Augmentation for Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown superior performance without task-specific fine-tuning due to the computational costs.
Approach: They propose a method which lets LLMs refer to the questions they have previously encountered and adaptively call for external resources when dealing with new questions.
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DRAMA: Diverse Augmentation from Large Language Models to Smaller Dense Retrievers (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong effectiveness and robustness when fine-tuned as dense retrievers.
Approach: They propose a training framework that leverages pruned LLMs to train smaller generalizable dense retrievers.
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In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2023.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Existing RALM methods focus on modifying the LM architecture to facilitate incorporation of external information, complicating deployment.
Approach: They propose to condition a language model on relevant documents from a grounding corpus during generation by conditioning on external knowledge sources.
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