通过拆解复杂问题提升大模型检索能力,让答案更准更可靠。
Question Decomposition for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- 用大模型把复杂问题拆成多个小问题,分步检索信息。
- 在多跳问答任务中,检索准确率提升36.7%,答案正确率提高11.6%。
- 无需额外训练,可直接接入现有系统,适合需要高精度的问答场景。
将大语言模型(LLMs)与可验证的外部来源结合是生成可信答案的成熟策略。检索增强生成(RAG)通过检索与问题语义相关的段落,并以此作为模型生成依据,在问答任务中表现优异。然而,对于多跳问题(如“NVIDIA、Apple 和 Google 中,哪家公司在2023年盈利最多?”),相关事实通常分散在多个文档中,标准RAG难以获取足够信息。为此,我们提出一种融合问题分解的RAG流程:(i) 利用大模型将原始问题分解为子问题;(ii) 分别检索每个子问题的相关段落;(iii) 合并候选池并使用交叉编码器重排,提升证据覆盖度与精确度。实验表明,问题分解有效整合互补文档,重排则降低噪声、提升关键段落优先级。尽管重排本身是常规技术,但结合现成交叉编码器与大模型驱动的问题分解,显著缩小了多跳问题上的检索差距,且无需额外训练或特殊索引。在MultiHop-RAG和HotpotQA数据集上,相比标准RAG基线,检索性能(MRR@10)提升36.7%,答案准确率(F1)提升11.6%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Grounding large language models (LLMs) in verifiable external sources is a well-established strategy for generating reliable answers. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is one such approach, particularly effective for tasks like question answering: it retrieves passages that are semantically related to the question and then conditions the model on this evidence. However, multi-hop questions, such as "Which company among NVIDIA, Apple, and Google made the biggest profit in 2023?," challenge RAG because relevant facts are often distributed across multiple documents rather than co-occurring in one source, making it difficult for standard RAG to retrieve sufficient information. To address this, we propose a RAG pipeline that incorporates question decomposition: (i) an LLM decomposes the original query into sub-questions, (ii) passages are retrieved for each sub-question, and (iii) the merged candidate pool is reranked to improve the coverage and precision of the retrieved evidence. We show that question decomposition effectively assembles complementary documents, while reranking reduces noise and promotes the most relevant passages before answer generation. Although reranking itself is standard, we show that pairing an off-the-shelf cross-encoder reranker with LLM-driven question decomposition bridges the retrieval gap on multi-hop questions and provides a practical, drop-in enhancement, without any extra training or specialized indexing. We evaluate our approach on the MultiHop-RAG and HotpotQA, showing gains in retrieval (MRR@10: +36.7%) and answer accuracy (F1: +11.6%) over standard RAG baselines.
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