English

Multi-task retriever fine-tuning for domain-specific and efficient RAG

Computation and Language 2025-07-18 v2 Information Retrieval Machine Learning

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become ubiquitous when deploying Large Language Models (LLMs), as it can address typical limitations such as generating hallucinated or outdated information. However, when building real-world RAG applications, practical issues arise. First, the retrieved information is generally domain-specific. Since it is computationally expensive to fine-tune LLMs, it is more feasible to fine-tune the retriever to improve the quality of the data included in the LLM input. Second, as more applications are deployed in the same real-world system, one cannot afford to deploy separate retrievers. Moreover, these RAG applications normally retrieve different kinds of data. Our solution is to instruction fine-tune a small retriever encoder on a variety of domain-specific tasks to allow us to deploy one encoder that can serve many use cases, thereby achieving low-cost, scalability, and speed. We show how this encoder generalizes to out-of-domain settings as well as to an unseen retrieval task on real-world enterprise use cases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.04652,
  title  = {Multi-task retriever fine-tuning for domain-specific and efficient RAG},
  author = {Patrice Béchard and Orlando Marquez Ayala},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.04652},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

7 pages, 2 figures. Accepted at Workshop on Structured Knowledge for Large Language Models (SKnowLLM) at KDD 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:00:07.502Z