# A Multi-Task Embedder For Retrieval Augmented LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07554 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07554/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Generation and context integration, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 50 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Generation and context integration](https://mlsanity.com/rag/generation-and-context-integration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [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)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14508/) (2023)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12652/) (2023)
- [Compressive Transformers for Long-Range Sequence Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05507/) (2019)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12784/) (2024)
- [Agent Lightning: Train ANY AI Agents with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03680/) (2025)
- [Towards Building Multilingual Language Model for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13963/) (2024)
- [From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14851/) (2024)
- [MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis For Universal Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14475/) (2024)
- [Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01219/) (2024)
- [A Review of Prominent Paradigms for LLM-Based Agents: Tool Use (Including RAG), Planning, and Feedback Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05804/) (2024)
- [StructRAG: Boosting Knowledge Intensive Reasoning of LLMs via Inference-time Hybrid Information Structurization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08815/) (2024)
- [Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Beyond: A Comprehensive Survey on How to Make your LLMs use External Data More Wisely](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14924/) (2024)
- [CRUD-RAG: A Comprehensive Chinese Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17043/) (2024)
- [Graph-constrained Reasoning: Faithful Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13080/) (2024)
- [GISTEmbed: Guided In-sample Selection of Training Negatives for Text Embedding Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16829/) (2024)
- [AutoVCoder: A Systematic Framework for Automated Verilog Code Generation using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18333/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Knowledge-Oriented Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10677/) (2025)
- [C-RAG: Certified Generation Risks for Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03181/) (2024)
- [KnowHalu: Hallucination Detection via Multi-Form Knowledge Based Factual Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02935/) (2024)
- [MA-RAG: Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Collaborative Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20096/) (2025)
- [AesopAgent: Agent-driven Evolutionary System on Story-to-Video Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07952/) (2024)
- [Towards LifeSpan Cognitive Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13265/) (2024)
- [Retrieving, Rethinking and Revising: The Chain-of-Verification Can Improve Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05801/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models for Financial Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05878/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Q&A with Domain-Specific Fine-Tuning and Iterative Reasoning: A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11792/) (2024)
- [Agentic-R: Learning to Retrieve for Agentic Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11888/) (2026)
- [The Silent Saboteur: Imperceptible Adversarial Attacks against Black-Box Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18583/) (2025)
- [Retrieval Augmented Diffusion Model for Structure-informed Antibody Design and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15040/) (2024)
- [MoRSE: Bridging the Gap in Cybersecurity Expertise with Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15748/) (2024)
- [AURA: A Fine-Grained Benchmark and Decomposed Metric for Audio-Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07470/) (2025)
- [Reward-RAG: Enhancing RAG with Reward Driven Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03780/) (2024)
- [What Makes In-context Learning Effective for Mathematical Reasoning: A Theoretical Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12157/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLMs confront inherent limitations in terms of its knowledge, memory, and action. The retrieval augmentation stands as a vital mechanism to address these limitations, which brings in useful information from external sources to augment the LLM. However, existing retrieval methods encounter two pressing issues. On one hand, the general retrievers are not properly optimized for retrieval augmentation hence exhibit limited effectiveness; on the other hand, the task-specific retrievers excel in the targeted retrieval augmentation scenario, while lack the versatility to handle diverse scenarios. In this work, we propose LLM-Embedder for the unified support of diverse retrieval augmentation scenarios. Our method presents three technical contributions. Firstly, we introduce a new textitreward formulation, namely rank-aware reward. It exploits the ranking position of the desired output among N sampled outputs from the LLM, which leads to fine-grained and robust computation of reward from the LLM's feedback. Secondly, we design a novel textitdistillation objective, called graded distillation. It incorporates both the absolute value and the relative order of the reward for more sufficient utilization of the LLM's feedback. Thirdly, we systematically optimize the textitmulti-task learning, which effectively unifies the multiple retrieval functionalities into one model. In our experiment, LLM-Embedder notably improves the LLM's performances in various downstream tasks, and outperforms both general and task-specific retrievers with a substantial advantage.