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Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens

21 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

21 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We enhance auto-regressive language models by conditioning on document chunks retrieved from a large corpus, based on local similarity with preceding tokens. With a $2$ trillion token database, our Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) obtains comparable performance to GPT-3 and Jurassic-1 on the Pile, despite using 25$\times$ fewer parameters. After fine-tuning, RETRO performance translates to downstream knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering. RETRO combines a frozen Bert retriever, a differentiable encoder and a chunked cross-attention mechanism to predict tokens based on an order of magnitude more data than what is typically consumed during training. We typically train RETRO from scratch, yet can also rapidly RETROfit pre-trained transformers with retrieval and still achieve good performance. Our work opens up new avenues for improving language models through explicit memory at unprecedented scale.

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representative citing papers

A Generalist Agent

cs.AI · 2022-05-12 · accept · novelty 7.0

Gato is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy using one transformer network to handle text, vision, games, and robotics tasks.

OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models

cs.CL · 2022-05-02 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

OPT releases open decoder-only transformers up to 175B parameters that match GPT-3 performance at one-seventh the carbon cost, along with code and training logs.

When AI reviews science: Can we trust the referee?

cs.AI · 2026-04-26 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

AI peer review systems are vulnerable to prompt injections, prestige biases, assertion strength effects, and contextual poisoning, as demonstrated by a new attack taxonomy and causal experiments on real conference submissions.

REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models

cs.CL · 2023-01-30 · conditional · novelty 6.0

REPLUG improves frozen black-box LMs by prepending LM-supervised retrieved documents, delivering 6.3% better language modeling on GPT-3 and 5.1% better five-shot MMLU on Codex.

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know

cs.CL · 2022-07-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.

Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models

cs.CL · 2022-06-15 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Emergent abilities are capabilities present in large language models but absent in smaller ones and cannot be predicted by extrapolating smaller model performance.

PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways

cs.CL · 2022-04-05 · accept · novelty 6.0

PaLM 540B demonstrates continued scaling benefits by setting new few-shot SOTA results on hundreds of benchmarks and outperforming humans on BIG-bench.

LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications

cs.CL · 2022-01-20 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

LaMDA shows that fine-tuning on human-value annotations and consulting external knowledge sources significantly improves safety and factual grounding in large dialog models beyond what scaling alone achieves.

Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI

cs.AI · 2025-06-02 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Small language models are sufficiently capable, more suitable, and far more economical than large models for the repetitive tasks that dominate agentic AI systems.

Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science

cs.CL · 2022-11-16 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0 · 2 refs

Galactica, a science-specialized LLM, reports higher scores than GPT-3, Chinchilla, and PaLM on LaTeX knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and medical QA benchmarks while outperforming general models on BIG-bench.

Less LLM, More Documents: Searching for Improved RAG

cs.IR · 2025-10-03 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

Corpus scaling in RAG frequently matches the accuracy gains from larger LLMs on open-domain QA tasks, with mid-sized models benefiting most due to better passage coverage.

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