Thought-Retriever: Don’t Just Retrieve Raw Data, Retrieve Thoughts

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed AI research thanks to their powerful internal capabilities and knowledge. However, existing LLMs still fail to effectively incorporate the massive external knowledge when interacting with the world. Although retrieval-augmented LLMs are proposed to mitigate the issue, they are still fundamentally constrained by the context length of LLMs, as they can only retrieve top-K raw data chunks from the external knowledge base which often consists of millions of data chunks. Here we propose Thought-Retriever, a novel model-agnostic algorithm that helps LLMs generate output conditioned on arbitrarily long external data, without being constrained by the context length or number of retrieved data chunks. Our key insight is to let an LLM fully leverage its intermediate thoughts generated when solving past user queries, organizing them in thought memory, and retrieving the relevant thoughts when addressing new queries. Notably, Thought-Retriever can self-evolve through continuous user interactions thanks to the growing number and depth of thoughts. Besides algorithmic innovation, we further meticulously prepare a novel benchmark, AcademicEval, which requires an LLM to faithfully leverage ultra-long context to answer queries based on real-world academic papers. Extensive experiments on AcademicEval and two other datasets validate that Thought-Retriever remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by achieving a 5%-45% higher win rate. More importantly, we further demonstrate 2 exciting findings: (1) Thought-Retriever can indeed help LLM self-evolve after solving more user queries; (2) Thought-Retriever learns to leverage deeper thoughts to answer more abstract user queries.