Fine Tuning vs. Retrieval Augmented Generation for Less Popular Knowledge

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01432v5
• Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2024 10:48:36 GMT
• Title: Fine Tuning vs. Retrieval Augmented Generation for Less Popular Knowledge
• Authors: Heydar Soudani, Evangelos Kanoulas, Faegheh Hasibi,
• Abstract summary: Language Models (LMs) memorize a vast amount of factual knowledge, exhibiting strong performance across diverse tasks and domains. The two prominent approaches to enhance the performance of LMs on low-frequent topics are: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning (FT) over synthetic data. This paper explores and evaluates the impact of RAG and FT on customizing LMs in handling low-frequency entities on question answering tasks.
• Score: 15.553942864736989
• License:
• Abstract: Language Models (LMs) memorize a vast amount of factual knowledge, exhibiting strong performance across diverse tasks and domains. However, it has been observed that the performance diminishes when dealing with less-popular or low-frequency concepts and entities, for example in domain specific applications. The two prominent approaches to enhance the performance of LMs on low-frequent topics are: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning (FT) over synthetic data. This paper explores and evaluates the impact of RAG and FT on customizing LMs in handling low-frequency entities on question answering tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on twelve LMs of varying size and type and different fine tuning, data augmentation, and retrieval models. Our findings indicate that while FT boosts the performance across entities of varying popularity, RAG surpasses FT by a large margin particularly for least popular factual knowledge. Additionally, the success of both RAG and FT approaches is amplified by improving retrieval and data augmentation techniques. Fine tuning, while beneficial for small LMs, requires extensive resources. To address this issue, we propose the new Stimulus RAG approach that surpasses the effectiveness of fine tuning based approaches, thereby eliminating the need for the costly data augmentation and fine tuning step for enriching LMs with less popular factual knowledge. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/informagi/RAGvsFT}.

Related papers

• Confident or Seek Stronger: Exploring Uncertainty-Based On-device LLM Routing From Benchmarking to Generalization [61.02719787737867]
  Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed and democratized on edge devices. One promising solution is uncertainty-based SLM routing, offloading high-stakes queries to stronger LLMs when resulting in low-confidence responses on SLM. We conduct a comprehensive investigation into benchmarking and generalization of uncertainty-driven routing strategies from SLMs to LLMs over 1500+ settings.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-02-06T18:59:11Z)
• FactorLLM: Factorizing Knowledge via Mixture of Experts for Large Language Models [50.331708897857574]
  We introduce FactorLLM, a novel approach that decomposes well-trained dense FFNs into sparse sub-networks without requiring any further modifications. FactorLLM achieves comparable performance to the source model securing up to 85% model performance while obtaining over a 30% increase in inference speed.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-15T16:45:16Z)
• Investigating Low-Rank Training in Transformer Language Models: Efficiency and Scaling Analysis [16.253898272659242]
  This study focuses on Transformer-based LLMs, specifically applying low-rank parametrization to feedforward networks (FFNs) Experiments on the large RefinedWeb dataset show that low-rank parametrization is both efficient (e.g., 2.6$times$ FFN speed-up with 32% parameters) and effective during training. Motivated by this finding, we develop the wide and structured networks surpassing the current medium-sized and large-sized Transformer in perplexity and throughput performance.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-13T10:08:55Z)
• DARG: Dynamic Evaluation of Large Language Models via Adaptive Reasoning Graph [70.79413606968814]
  We introduce Dynamic Evaluation of LLMs via Adaptive Reasoning Graph Evolvement (DARG) to dynamically extend current benchmarks with controlled complexity and diversity. Specifically, we first extract the reasoning graphs of data points in current benchmarks and then perturb the reasoning graphs to generate novel testing data. Such newly generated test samples can have different levels of complexity while maintaining linguistic diversity similar to the original benchmarks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-25T04:27:53Z)
• Fine-Tuning or Fine-Failing? Debunking Performance Myths in Large Language Models [0.8399688944263842]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capability to understand and generate human-like text from input queries. This study extends this concept to the integration of LLMs within Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. We evaluate the impact of fine-tuning on the LLMs' capacity for data extraction and contextual understanding.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-17T04:35:17Z)
• Improving Retrieval for RAG based Question Answering Models on Financial Documents [0.046603287532620746]
  This paper explores the existing constraints of RAG pipelines and introduces methodologies for enhancing text retrieval. It delves into strategies such as sophisticated chunking techniques, query expansion, the incorporation of metadata annotations, the application of re-ranking algorithms, and the fine-tuning of embedding algorithms.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-23T00:49:40Z)
• SLoRA: Federated Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Language Models [28.764782216513037]
  Federated Learning (FL) can benefit from distributed and private data of the FL edge clients for fine-tuning. We propose a method called SLoRA, which overcomes the key limitations of LoRA in high heterogeneous data scenarios. Our experimental results demonstrate that SLoRA achieves performance comparable to full fine-tuning.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-12T10:33:57Z)
• Scaling Relationship on Learning Mathematical Reasoning with Large Language Models [75.29595679428105]
  We investigate how the pre-training loss, supervised data amount, and augmented data amount influence the reasoning performances of a supervised LLM. We find that rejection samples from multiple models push LLaMA-7B to an accuracy of 49.3% on GSM8K which outperforms the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) accuracy of 35.9% significantly.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-03T15:34:01Z)
• To Repeat or Not To Repeat: Insights from Scaling LLM under Token-Crisis [50.31589712761807]
  Large language models (LLMs) are notoriously token-hungry during pre-training, and high-quality text data on the web is approaching its scaling limit for LLMs. We investigate the consequences of repeating pre-training data, revealing that the model is susceptible to overfitting. Second, we examine the key factors contributing to multi-epoch degradation, finding that significant factors include dataset size, model parameters, and training objectives.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-22T17:02:15Z)
• When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories [58.3421305091187]
  This paper aims to understand LMs' strengths and limitations in memorizing factual knowledge. We find that LMs struggle with less popular factual knowledge, and that scaling fails to appreciably improve memorization of factual knowledge in the long tail. We devise a simple, yet effective, method for powerful and efficient retrieval-augmented LMs, which retrieves non-parametric memories only when necessary.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-12-20T18:30:15Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.