Incentivizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Inner Adaptive Context Selection

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have emerged as a promising direction to merge the non-parametric knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs), thereby alleviating factual errors, hallucinations and outdated knowledge. Existing RAG methods, which append multiple retrieved documents or passages to the input of LLMs, will inevitably increase the context length, resulting in not only significant computational overhead and inference latency, but also performance degradation. Although reranking or compression modules have been introduced to address these challenges, they overlook the contextual preferences of the generative LLMs itself and may inadvertently discard information that is crucial for generation accuracy. To this end, we introduce InnerRAG, which incentivizes RAG via Inner Adaptive Context Selection. InnerRAG is a novel paradigm that empowers LLMs to autonomously select relevant context during generation. Our proposed InnerRAG endows the model to accurately identify the documents that are most helpful for generation from long contexts. By endowing the model with this capability, InnerRAG facilitates more effective exploitation of external knowledge without being misled by disturbed information, leading to substantial improvements in generation quality while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and human evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art RAG baselines. Moreover, our framework is orthogonal and complementary to in-context RAG approaches, offering further performance improvements when combined.