English

DH-RAG: A Dynamic Historical Context-Powered Retrieval-Augmented Generation Method for Multi-Turn Dialogue

Computation and Language 2025-02-20 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have shown substantial benefits in applications such as question answering and multi-turn dialogue \citep{lewis2020retrieval}. However, traditional RAG methods, while leveraging static knowledge bases, often overlook the potential of dynamic historical information in ongoing conversations. To bridge this gap, we introduce DH-RAG, a Dynamic Historical Context-Powered Retrieval-Augmented Generation Method for Multi-Turn Dialogue. DH-RAG is inspired by human cognitive processes that utilize both long-term memory and immediate historical context in conversational responses \citep{stafford1987conversational}. DH-RAG is structured around two principal components: a History-Learning based Query Reconstruction Module, designed to generate effective queries by synthesizing current and prior interactions, and a Dynamic History Information Updating Module, which continually refreshes historical context throughout the dialogue. The center of DH-RAG is a Dynamic Historical Information database, which is further refined by three strategies within the Query Reconstruction Module: Historical Query Clustering, Hierarchical Matching, and Chain of Thought Tracking. Experimental evaluations show that DH-RAG significantly surpasses conventional models on several benchmarks, enhancing response relevance, coherence, and dialogue quality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.13847,
  title  = {DH-RAG: A Dynamic Historical Context-Powered Retrieval-Augmented Generation Method for Multi-Turn Dialogue},
  author = {Feiyuan Zhang and Dezhi Zhu and James Ming and Yilun Jin and Di Chai and Liu Yang and Han Tian and Zhaoxin Fan and Kai Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.13847},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:50:15.772Z