HiQA: A Hierarchical Contextual Augmentation RAG for Multi-Documents QA
arXiv:2402.01767
HiQA is a framework for multi‑document question answering that uses hierarchical contextual augmentation and a multi‑route retrieval mechanism with cascading metadata to improve retrieval accuracy and reduce hallucinations, and introduces the MasQA benchmark.
Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has rapidly advanced the language model field, particularly in question-answering (QA) systems. By integrating external documents during the response generation phase, RAG significantly enhances the accuracy and reliability of language models. This method elevates the quality of responses and reduces the frequency of hallucinations, where the model generates incorrect or misleading information. However, these methods exhibit limited retrieval accuracy when faced with numerous indistinguishable documents, presenting notable challenges in their practical application. In response to these emerging challenges, we present HiQA, an advanced multi-document question-answering (MDQA) framework that integrates cascading metadata into content and a multi-route retrieval mechanism. We also release a benchmark called MasQA to evaluate and research in MDQA. Finally, HiQA demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance in multi-document environments.