提出Stable-RAG,解决检索顺序变化导致的幻觉问题。
Stable-RAG: Mitigating Retrieval-Permutation-Induced Hallucinations in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- 通过多顺序检索聚类隐藏状态,取中心点生成答案
- 在三个数据集上提升准确率与推理一致性
- 适合需要稳定输出的问答系统使用
检索增强生成(RAG)已成为减少大语言模型事实性幻觉的关键范式,但检索文档顺序对模型行为的影响尚未被充分研究。我们实证发现,在包含正确文档的前5个检索结果设置下,即使正确文档固定在首位,不同检索顺序仍会导致大语言模型的回答显著差异,揭示了对检索顺序敏感性的新问题。现有鲁棒RAG方法主要关注提升对低质量检索的鲁棒性及缓解位置偏差,但均未直接应对顺序敏感性。本文提出Stable-RAG,通过估计检索顺序敏感性来缓解由此引发的幻觉。Stable-RAG在多个检索顺序下运行生成器,聚类隐藏状态,并从聚类中心表示中解码,捕捉主导推理模式。随后利用这些推理结果将幻觉输出对齐至正确答案,促使模型在不同检索顺序下产生一致且准确的预测。在三个QA数据集上的实验表明,相比强基线,Stable-RAG在答案准确率、推理一致性及跨数据集、检索器和输入长度的泛化能力上均有提升。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a key paradigm for reducing factual hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet little is known about how the order of retrieved documents affects model behavior. We empirically show that under a Top-5 retrieval setting with the gold document included, LLM answers vary substantially across permutations of the retrieved set, even when the gold document is fixed in the first position. This reveals a previously underexplored sensitivity to retrieval permutations. Although existing robust RAG methods focus primarily on enhancing LLM robustness to low-quality retrieval and mitigating positional bias to distribute attention fairly over long contexts, neither approach directly addresses permutation sensitivity. In this paper, we propose Stable-RAG, which exploits permutation sensitivity estimation to mitigate permutation-induced hallucinations. Stable-RAG runs the generator under multiple retrieval orders, clusters hidden states, and decodes from a cluster-center representation that captures the dominant reasoning pattern. It then uses these reasoning results to align hallucinated outputs toward the correct answer, encouraging the model to produce consistent and accurate predictions across document permutations. Experiments on three QA datasets show that Stable-RAG improves answer accuracy, reasoning consistency, and generalization across datasets, retrievers, and input lengths compared with strong baselines.
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