Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Retrieval-augmented language model (RALM) represents a significant advancement in mitigating factual hallucination by leveraging external knowledge sources. However, the reliability of the retrieved information is not always guaranteed, and the retrieval of irrelevant data can mislead the response generation. Moreover, standard RALMs frequently neglect their intrinsic knowledge due to the interference from retrieved information. In instances where the retrieved information is irrelevant, RALMs should ideally utilize their intrinsic knowledge or, in the absence of both intrinsic and retrieved knowledge, opt to respond with "unknown" to avoid hallucination. In this paper, we introduces CHAIN-OF-NOTE (CON), a novel approach to improve robustness of RALMs in facing noisy, irrelevant documents and in handling unknown scenarios. The core idea of CON is to generate sequential reading notes for each retrieved document, enabling a thorough evaluation of their relevance to the given question and integrating this information to formulate the final answer. Our experimental results show that GPT-4, when equipped with CON, outperforms the CHAIN-OF-THOUGHT approach. Besides, we utilized GPT-4 to create 10K CON data, subsequently trained on LLaMa-2 7B model. Our experiments across four open-domain QA benchmarks show that fine-tuned RALMs equipped with CON significantly outperform standard fine-tuned RALMs.