arXiv:2501.15228cs.CLcs.IR2025-01NeurIPS被引 45

用多智能体强化学习统一优化RAG各模块,提升问答准确率。

Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

  • 将RAG各组件视为智能体,通过多智能体强化学习协同优化
  • 在多个基准上显著提升答案F1得分,优于现有方法
  • 适用于不同RAG架构,可适配多种问答任务

检索增强生成(RAG)广泛用于将外部知识融入大语言模型,以提高问答任务的准确性并减少幻觉。标准RAG流程包含查询重写、文档检索、文档过滤和答案生成等多个组件。然而,这些组件通常通过监督微调单独优化,导致各组件目标与整体生成准确答案的目标不一致。尽管近期研究尝试使用强化学习优化部分RAG组件,但多数仅聚焦于仅有两个组件的简化流程,未能充分处理模块间的复杂依赖与协作关系。为此,我们提出将多组件复杂RAG流程视为多智能体协作任务,每个组件作为独立的强化学习智能体。具体地,我们提出MMOA-RAG:用于RAG的多模块联合优化算法,利用多智能体强化学习使所有智能体目标统一于最终奖励(如答案的F1分数)。在多个问答基准上的实验表明,MMOA-RAG有效提升了整个流程的性能,并优于现有基线。此外,全面的消融研究验证了各组件的贡献,并证明MMOA-RAG可适配不同的RAG流程与基准。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely utilized to incorporate external knowledge into large language models, thereby enhancing factuality and reducing hallucinations in question-answering (QA) tasks. A standard RAG pipeline consists of several components, such as query rewriting, document retrieval, document filtering, and answer generation. However, these components are typically optimized separately through supervised fine-tuning, which can lead to misalignments between the objectives of individual components and the overarching aim of generating accurate answers. Although recent efforts have explored using reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize specific RAG components, these approaches often focus on simple pipelines with only two components or do not adequately address the complex interdependencies and collaborative interactions among the modules. To overcome these limitations, we propose treating the complex RAG pipeline with multiple components as a multi-agent cooperative task, in which each component can be regarded as an RL agent. Specifically, we present MMOA-RAG, Multi-Module joint Optimization Algorithm for RAG, which employs multi-agent reinforcement learning to harmonize all agents' goals toward a unified reward, such as the F1 score of the final answer. Experiments conducted on various QA benchmarks demonstrate that MMOA-RAG effectively boost the overall performance of the pipeline and outperforms existing baselines. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies validate the contributions of individual components and demonstrate MMOA-RAG can be adapted to different RAG pipelines and benchmarks.

RAG强化学习多智能体问答系统

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