When to Retrieve

• This is the official repo of the paper ACL'24: When Do LLMs Need Retrieval Augmentation? Mitigating LLMs’ Overconfidence Helps Retrieval Augmentation

Basic Usage

There are four steps to get the desired responses.

Inference

• Step1: Run run_llm.py to get the basic results

  python run_llm.py --source data/nq_sample.jsonl --ra none --type prior --outfile ./examples/test.jsonl --model chatgpt

  • You can specify --type [qa/qa_explain/qa_cot/qa_gene/prior/prior_punish/prior_explain/prior_pun_exp/prior_cot/prior_gene]

• Note

  • The desired format of the response is [Answer, Confidence]. For example, when the question is What is the capital of Chain, we expect the response to be "Beijing, Certain"
  • LLMs might produce responses that don't adhere to the expected format. It could simply provide the answer Beijing or the confidence Uncertain.
  • We perform post-processing to obtain the desired output format.

Post-process & Evaluate

• Step2: Get the indices of samples that do not match the expected output format.

  python collect.py --mode preprocess --source ./data/nq_sample.jsonl --input ./examples/test.jsonl --output ./examples/test_new.jsonl --confidence ./examples/confidence.jsonl --answer ./examples/answer.jsonl --model chatgpt

• Step3: Generate the missing results for these samples.

  python run_llm.py --source data/nq_sample.jsonl --ra none --type qa --outfile ./examples/post_answer.jsonl --idx ./examples/answer.jsonl --model chatgpt
  
  python run_llm.py --source ./examples/test.jsonl --ra none --type post --outfile ./examples/post_confidence.jsonl --idx ./examples/confidence.jsonl --model chatgpt

  • If a strategy including punish (i.e., prior_punish/prior_pun_exp) is used during inference, --type should be set to post_punish.

• Step4: Merge results and evaluate

  python collect.py --mode evaluate --source ./data/nq_sample.jsonl --input ./examples/test.jsonl --output ./examples/test_new.jsonl --confidence ./examples/post_confidence.jsonl --answer ./examples/post_answer.jsonl

RAG

Static RAG

python run_llm.py --source data/nq_sample.jsonl --ra [sparse/dense/gold] --type qa --outfile ./examples/test_gold_static.jsonl --model chatgpt

• For NQ, you can also specify --ra dpr as the gold documents. (We do this in our paper)

Adaptive RAG

Evaluation

• Static RAG

  python collect.py \
  	--mode eval_rag \
  	--input ./examples/test_gold_static.jsonl

• Adaptive RAG

  python collect.py \
  	--mode eval_adaptive_rag \
  	--input ./examples/test_gold_static.jsonl \ 
  	--origin ./examples/test_new.jsonl 

Note

You can find necessary commands in scripts/ and the demo data in examples/

The repository is continuously being updated.

Feel free to propose any issue.

Citation

If you find our paper/repo useful, please cite:

@article{ni2024llms,
  title={When Do LLMs Need Retrieval Augmentation? Mitigating LLMs' Overconfidence Helps Retrieval Augmentation},
  author={Ni, Shiyu and Bi, Keping and Guo, Jiafeng and Cheng, Xueqi},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.11457},
  year={2024}
}