Papers › 4bit-Quantization in Vector-Embedding for RAG

4bit-Quantization in Vector-Embedding for RAG

17 Jan 2025arXiv:2501.10534archive 2025-07-28

Taehee Jeong

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a promising technique that has shown great potential in addressing some of the limitations of large language models (LLMs). LLMs have two major limitations: they can contain outdated information due to their training data, and they can generate factually inaccurate responses, a phenomenon known as hallucinations. RAG aims to mitigate these issues by leveraging a database of relevant documents, which are stored as embedding vectors in a high-dimensional space. However, one of the challenges of using high-dimensional embeddings is that they require a significant amount of memory to store. This can be a major issue, especially when dealing with large databases of documents. To alleviate this problem, we propose the use of 4-bit quantization to store the embedding vectors. This involves reducing the precision of the vectors from 32-bit floating-point numbers to 4-bit integers, which can significantly reduce the memory requirements. Our approach has several benefits. Firstly, it significantly reduces the memory storage requirements of the high-dimensional vector database, making it more feasible to deploy RAG systems in resource-constrained environments. Secondly, it speeds up the searching process, as the reduced precision of the vectors allows for faster computation. Our code is available at https://github.com/taeheej/4bit-Quantization-in-Vector-Embedding-for-RAG

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QuantizationRAGRetrieval-augmented Generation

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBARTBERTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionRAGResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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