Papers with retrieval augmentation
Hybrid-RACA: Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Composition Assistance for Real-time Text Prediction (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) enhanced with retrieval augmentation have shown great performance in many applications, but their computational overhead and additional retrieval step limit their effectiveness in real-time tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that combines a cloud-based LLM with a smaller client-side model through retrieval augmented memory to provide real-time text prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can generate better responses from the cloud-based model while maintaining low latency. |
Retrieve-and-Sample: Document-level Event Argument Extraction via Hybrid Retrieval Augmentation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in many generative NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They investigate retrieval settings from the input and label distribution views . they further augment document-level EAE with pseudo demonstrations sampled from event semantic regions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can augment document-level EAE with pseudo demonstrations . the methods can be used in generative NLP tasks such as dialogue response generation . |
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. |
QUILL: Query Intent with Large Language Models using Retrieval Augmentation and Multi-stage Distillation (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive results on a variety of text understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage distillation approach that allows retrieval augmentation to be carried over without the increased compute associated with it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can carry over the gains of retrieval augmentation without suffering the increased compute typically associated with it. |
MEMORY-VQ: Compression for Tractable Internet-Scale Memory (2024.naacl-short)
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Yury Zemlyanskiy, Michiel de Jong, Luke Vilnis, Santiago Ontanon, William Cohen, Sumit Sanghai, Joshua Ainslie
| Challenge: | Memory-based methods like LUMEN pre-compute token representations for retrieved passages to speed up inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce storage requirements of memory-augmented models . they use a vector quantization variational autoencoder to compress token representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 16x compression rate with comparable performance on KILT benchmark. |
Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao, Hongbang Yuan, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand internal memory boundaries of language models by providing external context can often conflict, leading to knowledge conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prunes conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory or external context without updating model parameters. |
OccuTriage: An AI Agent Orchestration Framework for Occupational Health Triage Prediction (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Experimental evaluation on 2,589 occupational health cases demonstrates that OccuTriage outperforms single-agent approaches with a 20.16% average discordance rate compared to baseline rates of 43.05% . |
| Approach: | They propose to use specialized LLM agents, retrieval augmentation, and a bidirectional decision architecture to simulate healthcare professionals’ reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms single-agent approaches with a 20.16% average discordance rate while matching or exceeding human expert performance. |
A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based EAE methods have input length constraints and the gap between the retriever and the inference model. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based retrieval mechanism that overcomes input length constraints . they use compressive memory to cache retrieved information and support continuous updates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms retrieval-based methods on three public datasets. |
ReEval: Automatic Hallucination Evaluation for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Transferable Adversarial Attacks (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing static benchmarks do not guarantee that models can use the provided evidence for answering, which is essential to avoid hallucination when the required knowledge is new or private. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically perturb existing static one for dynamic evaluation by using a chatGPT framework and a set of open-domain QA datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates new test cases on two open-domain QA datasets and is human-readable and useful to trigger hallucination in LLMs. |
Augmentation-Adapted Retriever Improves Generalization of Language Models as Generic Plug-In (2023.acl-long)
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| 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 . |
Landmark Embedding: A Chunking-Free Embedding Method For Retrieval Augmented Long-Context Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval augmentation work with chunked contexts, which leads to poor quality of semantic representation and incomplete retrieval of useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for retrieval augmentation of long-context language modeling using landmark embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing retrieval methods with a notable advantage. |
A Multi-Task Embedder For Retrieval Augmented LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods face limitations in terms of knowledge, memory, and action. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval enhancement mechanism that brings in useful information from external sources to augment the LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the LLM’s performance in various downstream tasks while introducing superior retrieval augmentation’s effect over both general and task-specifc retrievers. |
When and How to Augment Your Input: Question Routing Helps Balance the Accuracy and Efficiency of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | augmented generation of knowledge-based long-tail questions can be useful for large language models, but can cause significant latency. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive question routing framework that uses a query router to augment input to the right time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing approaches in accuracy and efficiency on benchmarks such as AmbigNQ, HotpotQA, MMLU-STEM, and PopQA. |
ParetoRAG: Leveraging Sentence-Context Attention for Robust and Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation systems face persistent challenges in retrieval inefficiency and the inability of LLMs to filter out irrelevant information. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework that optimizes RAG systems through sentence-level refinement guided by the Pareto principle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves dual improvements in retrieval precision and generation quality without additional training or API resources while using only 40% of the tokens compared to traditional approaches. |
PAELLA: Parameter-Efficient Lightweight Language-Agnostic Captioning Model (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that only generate English captions are expensive due to the trend of scaling both data and model size. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient lightweight language-agnostic captioning model that uses retrieval enhancement to train parameters between a visual model and a multilingual language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models with more parameters and data and shows strong zero-shot abilities in low-resource languages. |
Investigating the Factual Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models with Retrieval Augmentation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive prowess in solving a wide range of tasks with world knowledge, but it remains unclear how well they perceive their factual knowledge boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a retrieval augmentation approach to enhance LLMs' awareness of factual knowledge boundaries to analyze factual and factual information in open-domain question answering (QA) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs’ QA and judgemental capabilities by integrating supporting documents with the questions. |
Evaluating Multi-Hop Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Chemistry-Centric Benchmark (2026.findings-eacl)
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Mohammad Khodadad, Ali Shiraee Kasmaee, Mahdi Astaraki, Nicholas Sherck, Hamidreza Mahyar, Soheila Samiee
| Challenge: | a new pipeline for compositional multi-hop reasoning in large language models is being developed . a recent study shows that even state-of-the-art models struggle with compositional reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that builds benchmarks from proprietary or public data . they use generative reasoning models, chemical named-entity recognition, and external knowledge bases to build knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline compares state-of-the-art models with and without retrieval augmentation . the pipeline is generalizable with fine-tuning, enabling creation of challenging benchmarks . |
The Effect of Scaling, Retrieval Augmentation and Form on the Factual Consistency of Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are useful interfaces to factual knowledge, but their usefulness is limited by their tendency to deliver inconsistent answers to semantically equivalent questions. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the effectiveness of up-scaling and augmenting the LM with a passage retrieval database to reduce inconsistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models reduce inconsistency but retrieval augmentation is more efficient. |
Understanding Retrieval Robustness for Retrieval-augmented Image Captioning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent retrieval-augmented models for image captioning are not perfect in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a retrieval-augmented captioning model SmallCap by sampling retrieved captions from more diverse sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is sensitive to tokens that appear in the majority of retrieved captions . the proposed model improves both in-domain and cross-domain performance . |
Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) Improves Confidence Calibration of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the confidence calibration of LLMs have not explored the effects of different prompting strategies on LLM performance. |
| Approach: | They propose Fact-and-Reflection prompting which improves LLM confidence calibration . they propose to use human cognition to elicit known "facts" and ask model to "reflect" over them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers the expected calibration error by 23.5% on multi-purpose QA tasks. |
When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with tasks requiring rich world knowledge, implying the difficulty of encoding a wealth of world knowledge in their parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmentation method that improves performance and reduces inference costs by only retrieving non-parametric memories when necessary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance and reduces inference costs by only retrieving non-parametric memories when necessary. |
KnowledgeBerg: Evaluating Systematic Knowledge Coverage and Compositional Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack systematic coverage of a bounded knowledge universe and compositional set-based reasoning over that universe. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for multiple-choice questions based on 1,183 enumeration seeds . they use knowledge width, cardinality of required universe, reasoning depth to formalize the challenge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks achieve only 5.26–36.88 F1 on universe enumeration and 16.00–44.19 accuracy on knowledge-grounded reasoning. |
TROVE: A Challenge for Fine-Grained Text Provenance via Source Sentence Tracing and Relationship Classification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated great potential in natural language generation, but their widespread adoption has raised concerns regarding content reliability and accountability. |
| Approach: | They propose a challenge to trace each sentence of a target text back to specific source sentences within potentially lengthy or multi-document inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed challenge traces each sentence of a target text back to specific source sentences . the dataset includes 11 scenarios covering QA and summarization in english and Chinese . |
TCRA-LLM: Token Compression Retrieval Augmented Large Language Model for Inference Cost Reduction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | ChatGPT and GPT-4 are commercial large language models (LLMs) however, they may produce vague responses or incorrect answers in certain specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a token compression scheme that uses summarization and semantic compression to reduce the token size of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token size by doing summarization and semantic compression while reducing token size with only 1.6% accuracy drop. |
Syntax-Aware Retrieval Augmentation for Neural Symbolic Regression (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Symbolic regression is a powerful technique for discovering mathematical expressions that best fit observed data. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-aware retrieval-augmented mechanism that leverages syntactic structure of symbolic expressions to perform context-awful retrieval from a pre-constructed token datastore. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms representative baselines on symbolic regression benchmarks and is validated on multiple symbolic regression datasets. |
SynthesizRR: Generating Diverse Datasets with Retrieval Augmentation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior approaches to synthesis use few-shot prompting, which relies on the LLM’s parametric knowledge to generate usable examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to generate examples of each label from the LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves lexical and semantic diversity, similarity to human-written text, and distillation performance, when compared to 32-shot prompting and four prior approaches. |
Not All Contexts Are Equal: Teaching LLMs Credibility-aware Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG paradigms suffer from the impact of flawed information introduced during the retrieval phrase, thereby diminishing the reliability and correctness of the generated output. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that empowers models to discern and process information based on its credibility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models with retrieval augmentation and exhibits robustness despite increasing noise in the context. |
HypER: Literature-grounded Hypothesis Generation and Distillation with Provenance (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on retrieval augmentation and focus on the quality of the output . Existing methods focus on generating a highly specific declarative statement ignoring the underlying reasoning process behind ideation. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model that generates evidence-based hypotheses using literature-guided reasoning and a multi-task setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the base model and generates evidence-grounded hypotheses with high feasibility and impact as judged by human experts. |
Astute RAG: Overcoming Imperfect Retrieval Augmentation and Knowledge Conflicts for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not linked the behavior of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with imperfect retrieval, including irrelevant, misleading, or even malicious information. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates external knowledge with source-awareness to overcome imperfect retrieval errors in RAG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is superior to previous robustness-enhanced approaches under the worst-case scenario. |
MetaBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Assessing LLMs in Metabolomics (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxing Lu, Xukai Zhao, J. Ben Tamo, Micky C. Nnamdi, Rui Peng, Shuang Zeng, Xingyu Hu, Jinzhuo Wang, May Dongmei Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on general text, but their proficiency in specialized scientific domains remains uncharacterized. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the capabilities of large language models in metabolomics research using MetaBench . they found that models perform well on text generation tasks, but cross-database identifier grounding remains challenging . |
| Outcome: | The evaluation of 25 open- and closed-source LLMs reveals distinct performance patterns across metabolomics tasks. |
A Survey of Toxicity Mitigation Strategies for Multilingual Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models can reproduce and amplify toxic content, including hate speech, harassment, and bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive survey of the many detoxification methods tailored to multilingual LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are based on data filtering, style transfer, expert-based logit steering, retrieval augmentation, and human feedback. |