# RETA-LLM: A Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Toolkit

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05212 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05212/

## Key facts

- Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG pipeline design and evaluation, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 23 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG pipeline design and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-pipeline-design-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12652/) (2023)
- [How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08910/) (2020)
- [Active Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06983/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09542/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08845/) (2023)
- [Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07001/) (2023)
- [Detecting Hallucinated Content in Conditional Neural Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02593/) (2020)
- [Query2doc: Query Expansion with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07678/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Know Your Contextual Search Intent: A Prompting Framework for Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06573/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Machine Translation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13294/) (2023)
- [Disentangled Modeling of Domain and Relevance for Adaptable Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05753/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07107/) (2023)
- [Personal LLM Agents: Insights and Survey about the Capability, Efficiency and Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05459/) (2024)
- [Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13721/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Uncertainty-Based Hallucination Detection with Stronger Focus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13230/) (2023)
- [When Large Language Models Meet Personalization: Perspectives of Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16376/) (2023)
- [Cognitive Mirage: A Review of Hallucinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06794/) (2023)
- [SuRe: Summarizing Retrievals using Answer Candidates for Open-domain QA of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13081/) (2024)
- [Small Models, Big Insights: Leveraging Slim Proxy Models To Decide When and What to Retrieve for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12052/) (2024)
- [LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11901/) (2024)
- [Personalized Large Language Model Assistant with Evolving Conditional Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17257/) (2023)
- [CorpusLM: Towards a Unified Language Model on Corpus for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01176/) (2024)
- [Special Characters Attack: Toward Scalable Training Data Extraction From Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05990/) (2024)
- [DomainRAG: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Domain-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05654/) (2024)
- [ERAGent: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Improved Accuracy, Efficiency, and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06683/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Retrieval and Managing Retrieval: A Four-Module Synergy for Improved Quality and Efficiency in RAG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10670/) (2024)
- [UniGen: A Unified Generative Framework for Retrieval and Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11036/) (2023)
- [Adapting Large Language Models for Education: Foundational Capabilities, Potentials, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08664/) (2023)
- [Elevating Legal LLM Responses: Harnessing Trainable Logical Structures and Semantic Knowledge with Legal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07912/) (2025)
- [Towards reducing hallucination in extracting information from financial reports using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10760/) (2023)
- [SEED: Domain-Specific Data Curation With Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00749/) (2023)
- [QUITO: Accelerating Long-Context Reasoning through Query-Guided Context Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00274/) (2024)
- [Conceptual Framework for Autonomous Cognitive Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06775/) (2023)
- [A Comparison of LLM Finetuning Methods & Evaluation Metrics with Travel Chatbot Use Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03562/) (2024)
- [Dr.Academy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Questioning Capability in Education for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10947/) (2024)
- [DCR-Consistency: Divide-Conquer-Reasoning for Consistency Evaluation and Improvement of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02132/) (2024)
- [QUITO-X: A New Perspective on Context Compression from the Information Bottleneck Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10497/) (2024)
- [A Roadmap Towards Automated and Regulated Robotic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14049/) (2024)
- [HelloFresh: LLM Evaluations on Streams of Real-World Human Editorial Actions across X Community Notes and Wikipedia edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03428/) (2024)
- [R-Eval: A Unified Toolkit for Evaluating Domain Knowledge of Retrieval Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11681/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in many domains, they still have a tendency to hallucinate and generate fictitious responses to user requests. This problem can be alleviated by augmenting LLMs with information retrieval (IR) systems (also known as retrieval-augmented LLMs). Applying this strategy, LLMs can generate more factual texts in response to user input according to the relevant content retrieved by IR systems from external corpora as references. In addition, by incorporating external knowledge, retrieval-augmented LLMs can answer in-domain questions that cannot be answered by solely relying on the world knowledge stored in parameters. To support research in this area and facilitate the development of retrieval-augmented LLM systems, we develop RETA-LLM, a {RET}reival-{A}ugmented LLM toolkit. In RETA-LLM, we create a complete pipeline to help researchers and users build their customized in-domain LLM-based systems. Compared with previous retrieval-augmented LLM systems, RETA-LLM provides more plug-and-play modules to support better interaction between IR systems and LLMs, including {request rewriting, document retrieval, passage extraction, answer generation, and fact checking} modules. Our toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/YuLan-IR/tree/main/RETA-LLM.