Building Language Models Based on Retrieval

Large language models (LLMs) have utterly transformed the field of natural language processing. However, training LLMs comes at a massive financial and environmental cost, making them out of reach of academic research labs. Meanwhile, these models are costly to update and brittle in leaking private text data. In this talk, I will argue that retrieval-based language models are a promising way of scaling LMs and overcoming the above limitations. I will discuss recent developments of retrieval-based language models, compare their pros and cons, and show their benefits in interpretability, adaptability, and privacy. In particular, I will introduce a new training approach for retrieval-based language models called TRIME (TRaining with In-batch MEmories), which can train LMs to retrieve better from the text during inference.