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Improving Language Models by Retrieving from Trillions of Tokens

by DeepMind · free · Last verified 2026-03-17

Presents RETRO (Retrieval-Enhanced Transformers), a model that retrieves from a 2-trillion-token database at inference time via chunked cross-attention. RETRO achieves performance comparable to GPT-3 with 25× fewer parameters by leveraging retrieved passages, demonstrating that retrieval augmentation is a compute-efficient alternative to scaling.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04426
B
BAbove Average
Adoption: B+Quality: AFreshness: C+Citations: AEngagement: F

Specifications

License
Open Access
Pricing
free
Capabilities
retrieval, language-modeling, compute-efficiency, trillion-scale-retrieval
Integrations
Use Cases
knowledge-grounded-generation, compute-efficient-lm, research
API Available
No
Tags
rag, retrieval, language-model, trillion-tokens, chunked-cross-attention
Added
2026-03-17
Completeness
100%

Index Score

69.4
Adoption
74
Quality
89
Freshness
58
Citations
88
Engagement
0

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