Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are expensive to train, deploy, and maintain, both financially and in terms of environmental impact.
Approach: They present a reality check on large language models and compare their predictions to retrieval-augmented language models.
Outcome: The proposed models fare better on question answering tasks and have become the foundation of impressive demos like Chat-GPT.

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More room for language: Investigating the effect of retrieval on language models (2024.naacl-short)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented language models are a promising alternative to standard pretraining, but little attention has been put into understanding what this type of training scheme does to the underlying language model when analyzed as a standalone -separated from the overall retrieval pipeline.
Approach: They propose an ‘ideal retrieval’ methodology to study these models in a fully controllable setting and propose a retrieval augmentation methodology to examine their effects.
Outcome: The proposed model saves substantially less world knowledge in their weights, but is worse at comprehending global context.
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.
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed approach performs better than previous approaches on various benchmarks.
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.
Outcome: The proposed method breaks brute-force combinations of retrievers with LLMs and lifts the performance of zero-shot retrieval to be very competitive on benchmark datasets.
Query Rewriting in Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on adapting either the retriever or the reader, but this approach is more focused on adaptation of the query itself.
Approach: They propose a new framework for retrieval-augmented Large Language Models . they propose rewrite-retrieve-read instead of retrieve-then-read .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance on downstream tasks, open-domain QA and multiple-choice QA.
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Iterative Retrieval-Generation Synergy (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent work has proposed to improve relevance modeling by having large language models actively involved in retrieval, i.e., to guide retrieval with generation.
Approach: They propose to have large language models actively involved in retrieval to guide retrieval with generation.
Outcome: The proposed method synergizes retrieval and generation in an iterative manner, and can generate better results in subsequent iterations.
Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) generate factually incorrect answers based on their parametric memory.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented large language model that can dynamically select the most suitable strategy based on query complexity.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the performance of QA systems on open-domain QA datasets.
Retrieval-based Language Models and Applications (2023.acl-tutorials)

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Challenge: In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive overview of retrieval-based language models.
Approach: This tutorial will provide a comprehensive overview of recent advances in retrieval-based language models.
Outcome: This tutorial will provide a comprehensive overview of recent advances in retrieval-based language models.
How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model? (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: In this paper, we show that large neural language models trained on unstructured text can attain competitive results on open-domain question answering benchmarks without access to external knowledge.
Approach: They propose to fine-tune pre-trained neural language models to answer questions without external knowledge . they show that this approach scales with model size and performs competitively .
Outcome: The proposed approach scales with model size and performs competitively with open-domain systems that explicitly retrieve answers from an external knowledge source when answering questions.
Assessing “Implicit” Retrieval Robustness of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a framework to enhance large language models with external knowledge, but its effectiveness is constrained by the retrieval robustness of the model.
Approach: They propose to use gold and distracting context to fine-tune models to handle relevant or irrelevant retrieved context in an end-to-end manner.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better when gold and distracting context are used, while still extracting correct answers when retrieval is accurate.
BlendFilter: Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Query Generation Blending and Knowledge Filtering (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models struggle with complex inputs and noisy knowledge retrieval hindering model effectiveness.
Approach: They propose a query generation method that integrates query generation blending with knowledge filtering to enhance retrieval-augmented LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks on open-domain question answering benchmarks.

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