Retrieving, Rethinking and Revising: The Chain-of-Verification Can Improve Retrieval Augmented Generation

Bolei He, Nuo Chen, Xinran He, Lingyong Yan, Zhenkai Wei, Jinchang Luo, Zhen-Hua Ling


Abstract
Recent Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating extensive knowledge retrieved from external sources. However, such approach encounters some challenges: Firstly, the original queries may not be suitable for precise retrieval, resulting in erroneous contextual knowledge; Secondly, the language model can easily generate inconsistent answer with external references due to their knowledge boundary limitation. To address these issues, we propose the chain-of-verification (CoV-RAG) to enhance the external retrieval correctness and internal generation consistency. Specifically, we integrate the verification module into the RAG, engaging in scoring, judgment, and rewriting. To correct external retrieval errors, CoV-RAG retrieves new knowledge using a revised query. To correct internal generation errors, we unify QA and verification tasks with a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning during training. Our comprehensive experiments across various LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability compared with other strong baselines. Especially, our CoV-RAG can significantly surpass the state-of-the-art baselines using different LLM backbones.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.607
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10371–10393
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.607/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.607
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bolei He, Nuo Chen, Xinran He, Lingyong Yan, Zhenkai Wei, Jinchang Luo, and Zhen-Hua Ling. 2024. Retrieving, Rethinking and Revising: The Chain-of-Verification Can Improve Retrieval Augmented Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 10371–10393, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Retrieving, Rethinking and Revising: The Chain-of-Verification Can Improve Retrieval Augmented Generation (He et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.607.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-emnlp.607.software.zip