Generative Retrieval with Few-shot Indexing
<|reference_start|>Generative Retrieval with Few-shot Indexing: Existing generative retrieval (GR) approaches rely on training-based indexing, i.e., fine-tuning a model to memorise the associations between a query and the document identifier (docid) of a relevant document. Training-based indexing has three limitations: high training overhead, under-utilization of the pre-trained knowledge of large language models (LLMs), and challenges in adapting to a dynamic document corpus. To address the above issues, we propose a novel few-shot indexing-based GR framework (Few-Shot GR). It has a novel few-shot indexing process, where we prompt an LLM to generate docids for all documents in a corpus, ultimately creating a docid bank for the entire corpus. During retrieval, we feed a query to the same LLM and constrain it to generate a docid within the docid bank created during indexing, and then map the generated docid back to its corresponding document. Few-Shot GR relies solely on prompting an LLM without requiring any training, making it more efficient. Moreover, we devise few-shot indexing with one-to-many mapping to further enhance Few-Shot GR. Experiments show that Few-Shot GR achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art GR methods that require heavy training.<|reference_end|>
@article{askari2024generative,
    title={Generative Retrieval with Few-shot Indexing},
    author={Arian Askari, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Zhaochun Ren,
  Evangelos Kanoulas, Suzan Verberne},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.02152},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.02152},
    primaryClass={cs.IR cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG}
}