REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models
Weijia Shi, Sewon Min, Michihiro Yasunaga, Minjoon Seo, Richard James, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, Wen-tau Yih
Abstract
We introduce REPLUG, a retrieval-augmented language modeling framework that treats the language model (LM) as a black box and augments it with a tuneable retrieval model. Unlike prior retrieval-augmented LMs that train language models with special cross-attention mechanisms to encode the retrieved text, REPLUG simply prepends retrieved documents to the input for the frozen black-box LM. This simple design can be easily applied to any existing language models. Furthermore, we show that the LM can be used to supervise the retrieval model, which can then find documents that help the LM make better predictions. Our experiments demonstrate that REPLUG with the tuned retriever significantly improves the performance of GPT-3 (175B) on language modeling by 6.3%, as well as the performance of Codex on five-shot MMLU by 5.1%. Code is publicly released at github.com/swj0419/REPLUG.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{shi-etal-2024-replug,
title = "{REPLUG}: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models",
author = "Shi, Weijia and
Min, Sewon and
Yasunaga, Michihiro and
Seo, Minjoon and
James, Richard and
Lewis, Mike and
Zettlemoyer, Luke and
Yih, Wen-tau",
editor = "Duh, Kevin and
Gomez, Helena and
Bethard, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jun,
year = "2024",
address = "Mexico City, Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.463/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.463",
pages = "8371--8384"
}