FoRAG: Factuality-optimized Retrieval Augmented Generation for Web-enhanced Long-form Question Answering

• Published in: arXiv.org
• Main Authors: Cai, Tianchi, Tan, Zhiwen, Song, Xierui, Sun, Tao, Jiang, Jiyan, Xu, Yunqi, Zhang, Yinger, Gu, Jinjie
• Format: Paper Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 19.06.2024
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computation and Language; Datasets; Questions; Retrieval; Search engines
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2406.13779

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become prevalent in question-answering (QA) tasks due to its ability of utilizing search engine to enhance the quality of long-form question-answering (LFQA). Despite the emergence of various open source methods and web-enhanced commercial systems such as Bing Chat, two critical problems remain unsolved, i.e., the lack of factuality and clear logic in the generated long-form answers. In this paper, we remedy these issues via a systematic study on answer generation in web-enhanced LFQA. Specifically, we first propose a novel outline-enhanced generator to achieve clear logic in the generation of multifaceted answers and construct two datasets accordingly. Then we propose a factuality optimization method based on a carefully designed doubly fine-grained RLHF framework, which contains automatic evaluation and reward modeling in different levels of granularity. Our generic framework comprises conventional fine-grained RLHF methods as special cases. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of our proposed \textit{Factuality-optimized RAG (FoRAG)} method on both English and Chinese benchmarks. In particular, when applying our method to Llama2-7B-chat, the derived model FoRAG-L-7B outperforms WebGPT-175B in terms of three commonly used metrics (i.e., coherence, helpfulness, and factuality), while the number of parameters is much smaller (only 1/24 of that of WebGPT-175B). Our datasets and models are made publicly available for better reproducibility: https://huggingface.co/forag.