RAG中文档表示方式影响生成质量,保留答案内容最关键。
On the impact of retrieved content representations in RAG Pipelines

- 固定检索结果,对比14种文档表示方法的差异。
- 答案保留率高时,表述、长度等细节对准确率影响小。
- 适合关注RAG优化与评估可靠性的研究者。
检索增强生成(RAG)通过引入检索文档补充语言模型输入,但多数RAG管道沿用为人类读者设计的检索组件。当消费方是大语言模型(LLM)而非人类时,检索内容应如何表示尚不明确。近期工作提出对检索内容的转换并识别影响生成的关键属性,但均孤立考察单一转换或属性,未能明确哪种表示特征最为重要。本文通过受控对比:保持检索不变,仅改变检索文档的表示形式,比较原始基线与13种转换(涵盖选择、摘要、重述),包含查询相关与无关变体。在四个生成器上测量问答准确率,并评估每种表示的答案保留率:即已知承载答案的文档在转换后是否仍能支持其答案。结果发现,答案保留率是生成器准确率的主要决定因素;尤其当保留率高时,表述、结构、长度及查询依赖性对性能影响有限。这表明先前研究中归因于特定机制的性能提升,可能部分源于这些机制对答案内容的保留能力,而这一归因需在控制保留率的前提下才能确定。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) supplements a language model's input with retrieved documents, yet most RAG pipelines inherit retrieval components designed for human readers. How retrieved content should be represented when the consumer is a large language model (LLM) rather than a human is less well understood. Recent work has proposed transformations of retrieved content and identified properties that affect generation, but each examines a single transformation or property in isolation, leaving open which features of a document's representation matter most. We address this with a controlled comparison: holding retrieval fixed, we vary only the representation of retrieved documents, comparing an original baseline against thirteen transformations spanning selection, summarisation, and reformulation, in query-dependent and query-independent variants. Across these fourteen representations we measure question-answering accuracy for four generators, and for each representation we also measure answer retention: whether a known answer-bearing document still supports its answer after transformation. We find that answer retention is the primary determinant of generator accuracy; notably, when retention is high, a representation's wording, structure, length, and query-dependence have limited effect. This suggests that accuracy gains attributed to specific mechanisms in prior work may be partly explained by how well those mechanisms preserve answer-bearing content, an attribution that cannot be settled without controlling for retention.
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