Revisiting Feedback Models for HyDE

Abstract

Recent approaches that leverage large language models (LLMs) for pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) have generally not utilized well-established feedback models like Rocchio and RM3 when expanding queries for sparse retrievers like BM25. Instead, they often opt for a simple string concatenation of the query and LLM-generated expansion content. But is this optimal? To answer this question, we revisit and systematically evaluate traditional feedback models in the context of HyDE, a popular method that enriches query representations with LLM-generated hypothetical answer documents. Our experiments show that HyDE's effectiveness can be substantially improved when leveraging feedback algorithms such as Rocchio to extract and weight expansion terms, providing a simple way to further enhance the accuracy of LLM-based PRF methods.