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Attention with Dependency Parsing Augmentation for Fine-Grained Attribution (2412.11404v1)

Published 16 Dec 2024 in cs.CL and cs.AI

Abstract: To assist humans in efficiently validating RAG-generated content, developing a fine-grained attribution mechanism that provides supporting evidence from retrieved documents for every answer span is essential. Existing fine-grained attribution methods rely on model-internal similarity metrics between responses and documents, such as saliency scores and hidden state similarity. However, these approaches suffer from either high computational complexity or coarse-grained representations. Additionally, a common problem shared by the previous works is their reliance on decoder-only Transformers, limiting their ability to incorporate contextual information after the target span. To address the above problems, we propose two techniques applicable to all model-internals-based methods. First, we aggregate token-wise evidence through set union operations, preserving the granularity of representations. Second, we enhance the attributor by integrating dependency parsing to enrich the semantic completeness of target spans. For practical implementation, our approach employs attention weights as the similarity metric. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms all prior works.

Summary

  • The paper introduces a novel fine-grained attribution system that aggregates token-level evidence using set union operations for improved content verification.
  • It integrates dependency parsing to enhance semantic context, thereby overcoming limitations of traditional averaging techniques in attribution.
  • The method leverages attention weights as similarity metrics, achieving superior performance and computational efficiency compared to existing approaches.

Attention with Dependency Parsing Augmentation for Fine-Grained Attribution

The paper in question proposes a novel method for achieving fine-grained attribution in the field of AI, with a focus on verifying the content generated by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models. This research identifies shortcomings in existing fine-grained attribution methodologies, which primarily leverage model-internal similarity metrics such as saliency scores and hidden state similarity. These methods either suffer from computational complexity or fail to offer granular attributions. Furthermore, approaches typically rely on decoder-only transformers that cannot incorporate context post-target span, a limitation that this paper aims to address through innovative techniques.

Core Contributions

  1. Attribution Improvements: The authors introduce a fine-grained attribution system that aggregates token-level evidence using set union operations, circumventing the costliness and granularity issues in traditional averaging techniques.
  2. Dependency Parsing Enhancement: A significant advancement provided is the integration of dependency parsing to enhance attribution. By parsing dependencies, the method enriches semantic contextual understanding, generating more precise attributions by factoring in related tokens beyond the target token.
  3. Attention-Based Similarity Metrics: The use of attention weights as similarity metrics further enhances the method's efficacy. Unlike gradient back-propagation, attention weights process more rapidly and present empirical superiority over hidden state similarity.
  4. Performance: Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches, including CCI and HSSAvg, while also demonstrating application across sentence-level attribution tasks.
  5. Computational Efficiency: With attention to engineering optimizations, the method overcomes practical challenges such as high GPU memory consumption and dependency on proprietary models.

Theoretical and Practical Implications

Theoretically, this method enriches the landscape of attribution models by coupling dependency parsing with attention mechanisms, thus integrating syntactic understanding to improve model-internal attribution processes. Practically, this advancement is especially pertinent in domains where precision and context-awareness in AI-generated data verification are critical, such as finance and healthcare. It reassures stakeholders by providing a more reliable means of content validation, ensuring that the generation aligns more closely with the context and retrieved data.

Discussion and Future Directions

While the efficacy of this solution is demonstrated via empirical results surpassing prior methods such as GPT-4 and others, further research could explore its application in more nuanced, cross-domain tasks. Additionally, future developments could aim at handling multilingual contexts, thus broadening the scope of its plausible utility.

In summation, the proposed approach marks a substantial improvement over existing attribution models, attested by its alignment with both human-oriented evidence and its inherent speed and efficiency. By implementing dependency-aware transformers, this research provides a crucial step toward more coherent, fine-grained attributions that serve to bridge the gap between AI predictions and human expectations in complex and information-rich settings.

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