retrieval-augmented

Definition

Describing a system that retrieves relevant documents and conditions generation on them. The payoff is that knowledge lives outside the weights: you update it by changing the corpus, and you can show which passage an answer came from. The usual contrast is fine-tuning, which bakes knowledge into parameters and gives you neither cheap updates nor traceable sources.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Explained: Retrieval-Augmented Skill Optimization via Cross-Harness Adaptation — Borrow Someone Else's Skill, Rewrite It for Your Own HarnessRetrieval-Augmented Skill Optimization via Cross-Harness Adaptation
• Why Language Models Hallucinate — The Mechanics and What Actually HelpsRetrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks