# BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20075 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20075/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 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 38 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12652/) (2023)
- [In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00083/) (2023)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02320/) (2020)
- [Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05672/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07107/) (2023)
- [Fine-Tuning LLaMA for Multi-Stage Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08319/) (2023)
- [RAFT: Adapting Language Model to Domain Specific RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10131/) (2024)
- [Generative Representational Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09906/) (2024)
- [Continual Pre-training of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03241/) (2023)
- [RA-DIT: Retrieval-Augmented Dual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01352/) (2023)
- [The Effect of Natural Distribution Shift on Question Answering Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14444/) (2020)
- [EcomGPT: Instruction-tuning Large Language Models with Chain-of-Task Tasks for E-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06966/) (2023)
- [eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08831/) (2024)
- [AmazonQA: A Review-Based Question Answering Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04364/) (2019)
- [Product-Aware Answer Generation in E-Commerce Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07696/) (2019)

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

- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [OG-RAG: Ontology-Grounded Retrieval-Augmented Generation For Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15235/) (2024)
- [Neuro-Symbolic Query Compiler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11932/) (2025)
- [Reference-Aligned Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering over Heterogeneous Proprietary Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19596/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system is important in domains such as e-commerce, which has many long-tail entities and frequently updated information. Most existing works adopt separate modules for retrieval and generation, which may be suboptimal since the retrieval task and the generation task cannot benefit from each other to improve performance. We propose a novel Backbone Shared RAG framework (BSharedRAG). It first uses a domain-specific corpus to continually pre-train a base model as a domain-specific backbone model and then trains two plug-and-play Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules based on the shared backbone to minimize retrieval and generation losses respectively. Experimental results indicate that our proposed BSharedRAG outperforms baseline models by 5% and 13% in Hit@3 upon two datasets in retrieval evaluation and by 23% in terms of BLEU-3 in generation evaluation. Our codes, models, and dataset are available at https://bsharedrag.github.io.