提出新方法R2C,为多步检索推理提供更准确的置信度评估。
Uncertainty Quantification for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning
- 通过扰动多步推理过程,捕捉检索与生成中的不确定性
- 在5个主流RAR系统上平均提升AUROC超5%
- 适合需要可靠输出判断的复杂问答与模型选择场景
检索增强推理(RAR)是检索增强生成(RAG)的最新演进,通过多步推理实现检索与生成。尽管对某些复杂查询有效,但RAR仍易出错且产生误导性输出。不确定性量化(UQ)可估计系统输出的置信度,但现有方法通常仅处理无检索或单步检索的简单查询,未能适配RAR架构。准确的RAR UQ需考虑检索与生成中所有不确定性来源。本文提出检索增强推理一致性(R2C),核心思想是通过在推理步骤中施加多种扰动,改变检索器输入,进而影响生成器输入,形成迭代反馈循环,从而捕捉两部分的不确定性。在五个主流RAR系统及多个QA数据集上的实验表明,R2C相比现有最优基线平均提升AUROC超过5%。外生评估显示,以R2C作为外部信号,在弃权任务中F1Abstain和AccAbstain均提升约5%;在模型选择任务中,精确匹配率比单一模型高约7%,比现有选择方法高约3%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-augmented reasoning (RAR) is a recent evolution of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that employs multiple reasoning steps for retrieval and generation. While effective for some complex queries, RAR remains vulnerable to errors and misleading outputs. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) offers methods to estimate the confidence of systems' outputs. These methods, however, often handle simple queries with no retrieval or single-step retrieval, without properly handling RAR setup. Accurate estimation of UQ for RAR requires accounting for all sources of uncertainty, including those arising from retrieval and generation. In this paper, we account for all these sources and introduce Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Consistency (R2C)--a novel UQ method for RAR. The core idea of R2C is to perturb the multi-step reasoning process by applying various actions to reasoning steps. These perturbations alter the retriever's input, which shifts its output and consequently modifies the generator's input at the next step. Through this iterative feedback loop, the retriever and generator continuously reshape one another's inputs, enabling us to capture uncertainty arising from both components. Experiments on five popular RAR systems across diverse QA datasets show that R2C improves AUROC by over 5% on average compared to the state-of-the-art UQ baselines. Extrinsic evaluations using R2C as an external signal further confirm its effectiveness for two downstream tasks: in Abstention, it achieves ~5% gains in both F1Abstain and AccAbstain; in Model Selection, it improves the exact match by ~7% over single models and ~3% over selection methods.
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