Skip to content
Book Open access

Latent Retrieval Augmented Generation

Jul 2026 · Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · pp. 4373-4378 · 0 citations · 17 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

Latent RAG is introduced, a novel paradigm that performs knowledge injection entirely within the continuous latent space, and enables more natural knowledge integration while achieving 9,200X storage reduction compared to Parametric RAG.

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 operate in explicit representation spaces: in-context methods inject knowledge through text tokens in the input, while parametric methods like Parametric RAG encode documents into model parameters. Although effective, these approaches face inherent limitations. In-context injection suffers from quadratic computational complexity with context length and degraded performance in complex reasoning tasks. Parametric injection, while reducing inference costs, requires substantial storage overhead and computationally expensive offline preprocessing. More fundamentally, both paradigms rely on explicit discrete representations tokens or parameters that may introduce information bottlenecks and hinder seamless knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we introduce Latent RAG, a novel paradigm that performs knowledge injection entirely within the continuous latent space. Our approach encodes documents into ultra-compact latent representations through an offline compression phase, and directly fuses them with the LLM's hidden states via a learned injection mechanism during inference. By operating in the semantic latent space rather than explicit token or parameter spaces, Latent RAG enables more natural knowledge integration while achieving 9,200X storage reduction compared to Parametric RAG. Experimental results on multiple RAG benchmarks demonstrate that Latent RAG substantially enhances both effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, it can be seamlessly combined with existing in-context and parametric methods to achieve even better performance.

Read PDF

Similar papers

#reinforcement learning Book Open access Aug 2026

NaviRAG: Learning to Navigate Knowledge Graphs for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a fundamental paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge. However, while recent structure-augmented approaches organize documents into graphs to improve information access, their retrieval strategies remain largely static, relying on similarity ranking or static probability diffusion. We identify that this paradigm suffers from two inherent limitations in complex reasoning: popularity bias, where retrieval paths are trapped by high-degree distractors, and signal decay, where relevance signals attenuate over long reasoning chains. To overcome these challenges, we propose NaviRAG, a novel framework that reformulates retrieval as a reinforcement learning-driven dynamic navigation problem on schema-less knowledge graphs (KGs). Unlike passive diffusion, NaviRAG employs an agent that actively traverses the graph to act as a search-space pruning engine, identifying logical multi-hop reasoning paths. Technically, we introduce three key components: (1) Structure-Aware Query Expansion, which bridges the modality gap between unstructured queries and structured graph seeds for precise initialization; (2) Target-Driven Reward Shaping, which provides dense supervision based on semantic progress toward gold documents, effectively mitigating the sparse reward problem in large-scale graph traversal; and (3) a Multi-View Hybrid Reranking strategy that operates on the highly-pruned candidate subgraph, integrating policy confidence, semantic relevance, and global structural importance to ensure robust candidate selection. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop QA datasets and two single-hop QA datasets demonstrate that NaviRAG significantly outperforms baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in multi-hop QA while maintaining robustness in single-hop QA. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CkingEW/NaviRAG.

Jinghong Lei, Wang Kun, Zhigang Chen et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

RAGOCR: Optical Compression of Retrieval-Augmented Text via Visual Representation

This work introduces RAGOCR, a novel framework that compresses retrieved documents into compact visual representations conditioned on the input query, and introduces a query-aware dynamic resolution mechanism that adaptively allocates visual granularity based on each document's estimated relevance and complexity.

Jia-Yang Yu, Jialun Zhong, Lei Zou · 0 citations
Jul 2026

LLM-Based Generative Retrieval for Snapchat Content Recommendation

The design and launch of SnapLGR, an LLM-based generative retrieval system for short-video recommendation at Snapchat shows that successful production SnapLGR requires joint design across representation learning, vocabulary grounding, and efficient training and serving.

Liam Collins, Jiwen Ren, Donald Loveland et al. · 0 citations
Open access 2026

SAC-RAG: Semantic Adaptive Context Compression for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Experimental results show that SAC-RAG reduces token consumption by 38%–58% at the cost of only a 1–2 percentage point EM drop, with EM actually improving after compression for reasoning-type questions, achieving the optimal quality–efficiency trade-off in terms of token consumption.

Deyu Zhang, Hongqiang Yu, Jinze Huo et al. · 0 citations
Conference Jul 2026

DART: dynamic adapter refinement at test-time for multimodal document retrieval

Empirical evaluations across a diverse suite of multimodal document retrieval benchmarks reveal that DART achieves consistent and significant gains in ranking precision, and this dynamic refinement process introduces minimal computational latency, offering a highly efficient, plug-and-play solution for adaptive document retrieval.

Jing Zhang, Yaowei Wang, Chongyu Wang et al. · 0 citations
Book Open access Aug 2026

Collaborative Memory Augmentation for Generative Recommendation

Generative Recommendation (GR) has exhibited great potential by modeling item transitions as a sequence-to-sequence task. Despite the success of GR, existing frameworks primarily focus on modeling individual user sequences within a constrained internal parametric space, failing to explicitly leverage cross-user collaborative signals. To address this issue, we propose OMEGA, a cOllaborative MEmory augmentation framework for Generative recommendAtion. OMEGA bridges the gap between implicit parametric knowledge and explicit collaborative signals. We first introduce a latent context compression method that utilizes learnable query tokens to distill sequential user behavior into compact representations, significantly reducing storage overhead. These compressed representations are aggregated into a collaborative memory bank, serving as an explicit repository of global behavioral patterns. To ensure precise knowledge acquisition, we design a lightweight and target-aware retrieval mechanism that identifies pertinent memories by considering both sequence-level and target-level similarities. Furthermore, a context-aware integration module, equipped with a gated cross-attention mechanism, is employed to adaptively fuse the retrieved collaborative memories with the local user context while mitigating the interference of noisy patterns. Empirical evaluations on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that OMEGA significantly outperforms existing advanced GR models, validating the potential of external memory as a complement to the generative paradigm.

Enze Liu, Zhen Tian, W. Zhao · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.