transformers/docs/source/en/model_doc/rag.md

RAG

Overview

Retrieval-augmented generation ("RAG") models combine the powers of pretrained dense retrieval (DPR) and sequence-to-sequence models. RAG models retrieve documents, pass them to a seq2seq model, then marginalize to generate outputs. The retriever and seq2seq modules are initialized from pretrained models, and fine-tuned jointly, allowing both retrieval and generation to adapt to downstream tasks.

It is based on the paper Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks by Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandara Piktus, Fabio Petroni, Vladimir Karpukhin, Naman Goyal, Heinrich Küttler, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, Douwe Kiela.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

Large pre-trained language models have been shown to store factual knowledge in their parameters, and achieve state-of-the-art results when fine-tuned on downstream NLP tasks. However, their ability to access and precisely manipulate knowledge is still limited, and hence on knowledge-intensive tasks, their performance lags behind task-specific architectures. Additionally, providing provenance for their decisions and updating their world knowledge remain open research problems. Pre-trained models with a differentiable access mechanism to explicit nonparametric memory can overcome this issue, but have so far been only investigated for extractive downstream tasks. We explore a general-purpose fine-tuning recipe for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — models which combine pre-trained parametric and non-parametric memory for language generation. We introduce RAG models where the parametric memory is a pre-trained seq2seq model and the non-parametric memory is a dense vector index of Wikipedia, accessed with a pre-trained neural retriever. We compare two RAG formulations, one which conditions on the same retrieved passages across the whole generated sequence, the other can use different passages per token. We fine-tune and evaluate our models on a wide range of knowledge-intensive NLP tasks and set the state-of-the-art on three open domain QA tasks, outperforming parametric seq2seq models and task-specific retrieve-and-extract architectures. For language generation tasks, we find that RAG models generate more specific, diverse and factual language than a state-of-the-art parametric-only seq2seq baseline.

This model was contributed by ola13.

Usage tips

Retrieval-augmented generation ("RAG") models combine the powers of pretrained dense retrieval (DPR) and Seq2Seq models. RAG models retrieve docs, pass them to a seq2seq model, then marginalize to generate outputs. The retriever and seq2seq modules are initialized from pretrained models, and fine-tuned jointly, allowing both retrieval and generation to adapt to downstream tasks.

RagConfig

autodoc RagConfig

RagTokenizer

autodoc RagTokenizer

Rag specific outputs

autodoc models.rag.modeling_rag.RetrievAugLMMarginOutput

autodoc models.rag.modeling_rag.RetrievAugLMOutput

RagRetriever

autodoc RagRetriever

RagModel

autodoc RagModel - forward

RagSequenceForGeneration

autodoc RagSequenceForGeneration - forward - generate

RagTokenForGeneration

autodoc RagTokenForGeneration - forward - generate

TFRagModel

autodoc TFRagModel - call

TFRagSequenceForGeneration

autodoc TFRagSequenceForGeneration - call - generate

TFRagTokenForGeneration

autodoc TFRagTokenForGeneration - call - generate