# RFiD: Towards Rational Fusion-in-Decoder for Open-Domain Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17041 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17041/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12652/) (2023)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Fooling LIME and SHAP: Adversarial Attacks on Post hoc Explanation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02508/) (2019)
- [Learning the Difference that Makes a Difference with Counterfactually-Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12434/) (2019)
- [Generate rather than Retrieve: Large Language Models are Strong Context Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10063/) (2022)
- [Distilling Knowledge from Reader to Retriever for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04584/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Search Engines: Generating Substrings as Document Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10628/) (2022)
- [Measuring the tendency of CNNs to Learn Surface Statistical Regularities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11561/) (2017)
- [Robustness to Spurious Correlations in Text Classification via Automatically Generated Counterfactuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10040/) (2020)
- [KG-FiD: Infusing Knowledge Graph in Fusion-in-Decoder for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04330/) (2021)
- [Explaining The Efficacy of Counterfactually Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02114/) (2020)
- [Can Generative Pre-trained Language Models Serve as Knowledge Bases for Closed-book QA?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01561/) (2021)
- [Generating Data to Mitigate Spurious Correlations in Natural Language Inference Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12942/) (2022)
- [Evidentiality-guided Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08688/) (2021)
- [R2-D2: A Modular Baseline for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03502/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Efficacy of Automatically Generated Counterfactuals for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15231/) (2021)
- [A Rationale-Centric Framework for Human-in-the-loop Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12918/) (2022)
- [Grape: Knowledge Graph Enhanced Passage Reader for Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02933/) (2022)
- [FactMix: Using a Few Labeled In-domain Examples to Generalize to Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11464/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [PandaLM: An Automatic Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Instruction Tuning Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05087/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Question Answering for Enterprise Knowledge Bases using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08695/) (2024)
- [Retrieval as a Decision: Training-Free Adaptive Gating for Efficient RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09803/) (2025)
- [Prompting is not Enough: Exploring Knowledge Integration and Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19660/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems necessitate a reader model capable of generating answers by simultaneously referring to multiple passages. Although representative models like Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) have been proposed to address this challenge, these systems can inadvertently rely on spurious features instead of genuine causal relationships between the question and the passages to generate answers. To counter this problem, we introduce the Rational Fusion-in-Decoder (RFiD) model. Our model leverages the encoders of FiD to differentiate between causal relationships and spurious features, subsequently guiding the decoder to generate answers informed by this discernment. Experimental results on two ODQA datasets, Natural Questions (NQ) and TriviaQA (TQ), demonstrate that our model surpasses previous methods, achieving improvements of up to 1.5 and 0.7 in Exact Match scores on NQ, and exhibits an enhanced ability to identify causal relationships.