Diversity Enhances an LLM's Performance in RAG and Long-context Task

Abstract: The rapid advancements in LLMs have highlighted the challenge of context window limitations, primarily due to the quadratic time complexity of the self-attention mechanism ((O(N^2)), where (N) denotes the context window length). This constraint impacts tasks such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in question answering (Q&A) and long context summarization. A common approach involves selecting content with the highest similarity to the query; however, this often leads to redundancy and the exclusion of diverse yet relevant information. Building on principles from Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) and Farthest Point Sampling (FPS), we integrate diversity into the content selection process. Our findings reveal that incorporating diversity substantially increases the recall of selecting relevant sentences or chunks before LLM-based Q&A and summarization. These results highlight the importance of maintaining diversity in future LLM applications to further improve summarization and Q&A outcomes.