Parametric Retrieval Augmented Generation

Abstract

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance the reliability of large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge. Existing RAG methods share a common strategy for knowledge injection: they place the retrieved documents into the input context of the LLM, which we refer to as the in-context knowledge injection method. While this approach is simple and often effective, it has inherent limitations. Firstly, increasing the context length and number of relevant documents can lead to higher computational overhead and degraded performance, especially in complex reasoning tasks. More importantly, in-context knowledge injection operates primarily at the input level, but LLMs store their internal knowledge in their parameters. This gap fundamentally limits the capacity of in-context methods. To this end, we introduce Parametric RAG, a new RAG paradigm that integrates external knowledge directly into the feed-forward networks of an LLM through document parameterization. This approach not only reduces online computational costs by shortening the input context length, but also deepens the integration of external knowledge by enabling LLMs to utilize it in the same way as internal parametric knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate that Parametric RAG substantially enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge augmentation in LLMs. Also, it can be combined with in-context RAG methods to achieve even better performance. We have open-sourced all the code, data, and models in the following GitHub link: https://github.com/oneal2000/PRAG