Multi-task retriever fine-tuning for domain-specific and efficient RAG

Patrice Bechard, Orlando Marquez

Multi-task retriever fine-tuning for domain-specific and efficient RAG: 10 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #12 of 13 papers on 2025-01-09. Day-by-day upvote history.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become ubiquitous when deploying Large Language Models (LLMs), as it can address typical limitations such as generating hallucinated or outdated information. However, when building real-world RAG applications, practical issues arise. First, the retrieved information is generally domain-specific. Since it is computationally expensive to fine-tune LLMs, it is more feasible to fine-tune the retriever to improve the quality of the data included in the LLM input. Second, as more applications are deployed in the same real-world system, one cannot afford to deploy separate retrievers. Moreover, these RAG applications normally retrieve different kinds of data. Our solution is to instruction fine-tune a small retriever encoder on a variety of domain-specific tasks to allow us to deploy one encoder that can serve many use cases, thereby achieving low-cost, scalability, and speed. We show how this encoder generalizes to out-of-domain settings as well as to an unseen retrieval task on real-world enterprise use cases.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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