Pistis-RAG: A Scalable Cascading Framework Towards Content-Centric Retrieval-Augmented Generation
This work argues that the alignment issue between LLMs and external knowledge ranking methods is tied to the model-centric paradigm dominant in RAG systems, and proposes a content-centric approach, emphasizing seamless integration between LLMs and external information sources to optimize content transformation for specific tasks.
Abstract
In Greek mythology, Pistis symbolized good faith, trust, and reliability. Drawing inspiration from these principles, Pistis-RAG is a scalable multi-stage framework designed to address the challenges of large-scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. This framework consists of distinct stages: matching, pre-ranking, ranking, reasoning, and aggregating. Each stage contributes to narrowing the search space, prioritizing semantically relevant documents, aligning with the large language model’s (LLM) preferences, supporting complex chain-of-thought (CoT) methods, and combining information from multiple sources. Our ranking stage introduces a significant innovation by recognizing that semantic relevance alone may not lead to improved generation quality, due to the sensitivity of the few-shot prompt order, as noted in previous research [8]. This critical aspect is often overlooked in current RAG frameworks. We argue that the alignment issue between LLMs and external knowledge ranking methods is tied to the model-centric paradigm dominant in RAG systems. We propose a content-centric approach, emphasizing seamless integration between LLMs and external information sources to optimize content transformation for specific tasks. Our novel ranking stage is designed specifically