让大模型分步检索多源信息,提升复杂任务推理能力
Reinforcing Compositional Retrieval: Retrieving Step-by-Step for Composing Informative Contexts
- 将检索过程建模为马尔可夫决策过程,分步选择并依赖前序结果
- 在多个基准上超越基线,显著提升多源信息组合的准确性
- 适合需要多证据推理的任务,如复杂问答与程序生成
大型语言模型(LLMs)在众多任务中表现卓越,但常需外部上下文处理复杂问题。传统检索增强框架通常单次选取最高排名文档,而现实场景常需组合多个来源的协同检索。本文提出一种三编码器序列检索器,将该过程建模为马尔可夫决策过程(MDP),将一组元素的检索概率分解为一系列条件概率,使每一步检索可依赖先前选择的示例。我们采用两阶段训练:首先高效构建监督序列数据用于初始策略训练;随后通过基于生成程序结构对应性的奖励,优化策略以对齐LLM偏好。实验表明,该方法在多个基准上持续且显著优于基线,验证了显式建模示例间依赖关系的重要性。研究结果凸显了组合式检索在需多条证据或示例的任务中的潜力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across numerous tasks, yet they often rely on external context to handle complex tasks. While retrieval-augmented frameworks traditionally focus on selecting top-ranked documents in a single pass, many real-world scenarios demand compositional retrieval, where multiple sources must be combined in a coordinated manner. In this work, we propose a tri-encoder sequential retriever that models this process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), decomposing the probability of retrieving a set of elements into a sequence of conditional probabilities and allowing each retrieval step to be conditioned on previously selected examples. We train the retriever in two stages: first, we efficiently construct supervised sequential data for initial policy training; we then refine the policy to align with the LLM's preferences using a reward grounded in the structural correspondence of generated programs. Experimental results show that our method consistently and significantly outperforms baselines, underscoring the importance of explicitly modeling inter-example dependencies. These findings highlight the potential of compositional retrieval for tasks requiring multiple pieces of evidence or examples.
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