CLaRa: Bridging Retrieval and Generation with Continuous Latent Reasoning

Apple · 3 months ago · 25

CLaRa is a framework that improves retrieval-augmented generation by compressing documents and jointly optimizing retrieval and generation in a shared continuous space. The method achieves state-of-the-art performance on QA benchmarks at a compression rate of 16, meaning documents are reduced to 1/16th their original length while maintaining answer quality. This unified approach allows gradients to flow through both retrieval and generation modules, aligning document relevance with answer quality during training.