# Alleviating LLM-based Generative Retrieval Hallucination in Alipay Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Magpie: Alignment Data Synthesis from Scratch by Prompting Aligned LLMs with Nothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08464/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07107/) (2023)
- [Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06467/) (2020)
- [Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06991/) (2022)
- [InstructRAG: Instructing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Self-Synthesized Rationales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13629/) (2024)
- [SimLM: Pre-training with Representation Bottleneck for Dense Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02578/) (2022)
- [From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14851/) (2024)
- [Learning to Tokenize for Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04171/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Retrieval in Continuous Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08008/) (2018)
- [CorpusBrain: Pre-train a Generative Retrieval Model for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07652/) (2022)
- [Multiview Identifiers Enhanced Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16675/) (2023)
- [Hi-Gen: Generative Retrieval For Large-Scale Personalized E-commerce Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15675/) (2024)
- [Boosting LLM-based Relevance Modeling with Distribution-Aware Robust Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12504/) (2024)

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

- [AgentDR: Dynamic Recommendation with Implicit Item-Item Relations via LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05598/) (2025)
- [From Relevance to Authority: Authority-aware Generative Retrieval in Web Search Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13468/) (2026)
- [RAG-Enhanced Large Language Models for Dynamic Content Expiration Prediction in Web Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13052/) (2026)
- [Do LLM Recommenders Know When They're Hallucinating? Auditing Confidence Calibration in Catalog Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10008/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative retrieval (GR) has revolutionized document retrieval with the advent of large language models (LLMs), and LLM-based GR is gradually being adopted by the industry. Despite its remarkable advantages and potential, LLM-based GR suffers from hallucination and generates documents that are irrelevant to the query in some instances, severely challenging its credibility in practical applications. We thereby propose an optimized GR framework designed to alleviate retrieval hallucination, which integrates knowledge distillation reasoning in model training and incorporate decision agent to further improve retrieval precision. Specifically, we employ LLMs to assess and reason GR retrieved query-document (q-d) pairs, and then distill the reasoning data as transferred knowledge to the GR model. Moreover, we utilize a decision agent as post-processing to extend the GR retrieved documents through retrieval model and select the most relevant ones from multi perspectives as the final generative retrieval result. Extensive offline experiments on real-world datasets and online A/B tests on Fund Search and Insurance Search in Alipay demonstrate our framework's superiority and effectiveness in improving search quality and conversion gains.