@inproceedings{xu-etal-2023-retrieval,
    title = "Retrieval-Augmented Domain Adaptation of Language Models",
    author = "Xu, Benfeng  and
      Zhao, Chunxu  and
      Jiang, Wenbin  and
      Zhu, PengFei  and
      Dai, Songtai  and
      Pang, Chao  and
      Sun, Zhuo  and
      Wang, Shuohuan  and
      Sun, Yu",
    editor = "Can, Burcu  and
      Mozes, Maximilian  and
      Cahyawijaya, Samuel  and
      Saphra, Naomi  and
      Kassner, Nora  and
      Ravfogel, Shauli  and
      Ravichander, Abhilasha  and
      Zhao, Chen  and
      Augenstein, Isabelle  and
      Rogers, Anna  and
      Cho, Kyunghyun  and
      Grefenstette, Edward  and
      Voita, Lena",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP 2023)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.repl4nlp-1.5",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.repl4nlp-1.5",
    pages = "54--64",
    abstract = "Language models pretrained on general domain corpora usually exhibit considerable degradation when generalizing to downstream tasks of specialized domains. Existing approaches try to construct PLMs for each specific domains either from scratch or through further pretraining, which not only costs substantial resources, but also fails to cover all target domains at various granularity. In this work, we propose RADA, a novel Retrieval-Augmented framework for Domain Adaptation. We first construct a textual corpora that covers the downstream task at flexible domain granularity and resource availability. We employ it as a pluggable datastore to retrieve informative background knowledge, and integrate them into the standard language model framework to augment representations. We then propose a two-level selection scheme to integrate the most relevant information while alleviating irrelevant noises. Specifically, we introduce a differentiable sampling module as well as an attention mechanism to achieve both passage-level and word-level selection. Such a retrieval-augmented framework enables domain adaptation of language models with flexible domain coverage and fine-grained domain knowledge integration. We conduct comprehensive experiments across biomedical, science and legal domains to demonstrate the effectiveness of the overall framework, and its advantage over existing solutions.",
}

Language models pretrained on general domain corpora usually exhibit considerable degradation when generalizing to downstream tasks of specialized domains. Existing approaches try to construct PLMs for each specific domains either from scratch or through further pretraining, which not only costs substantial resources, but also fails to cover all target domains at various granularity. In this work, we propose RADA, a novel Retrieval-Augmented framework for Domain Adaptation. We first construct a textual corpora that covers the downstream task at flexible domain granularity and resource availability. We employ it as a pluggable datastore to retrieve informative background knowledge, and integrate them into the standard language model framework to augment representations. We then propose a two-level selection scheme to integrate the most relevant information while alleviating irrelevant noises. Specifically, we introduce a differentiable sampling module as well as an attention mechanism to achieve both passage-level and word-level selection. Such a retrieval-augmented framework enables domain adaptation of language models with flexible domain coverage and fine-grained domain knowledge integration. We conduct comprehensive experiments across biomedical, science and legal domains to demonstrate the effectiveness of the overall framework, and its advantage over existing solutions.
Xu, Benfeng Zhao, Chunxu Jiang, Wenbin Zhu, PengFei Dai, Songtai Pang, Chao Sun, Zhuo Wang, Shuohuan Sun, Yu
Retrieval-Augmented Domain Adaptation of Language Models