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Equation 21 · Part 6 · From BM25 to Agentic Retrieval: A History of Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Symbol p_eta

p(y∣x)≈∑z∈top-k(pη(⋅∣x))pη(z∣x) pθ(y∣x,z),p(y \mid x) \approx \sum_{z \in \mathrm{top}\text{-}k\left(p_\eta(\cdot \mid x)\right)} p_\eta(z \mid x) \, p_\theta(y \mid x, z),
pηp_\eta

What this part means

pep_eta appears in the bound of this sum. The bound states where the repeated operation starts, ends, or which values it includes.

Its job in the formula

pep_eta appears in the bound of this sum. The bound states where the repeated operation starts, ends, or which values it includes.

The passage around this formula

By the time Lewis and colleagues published in 2020, learned dense retrieval and large pretrained generators both already existed as separate lines of work. The paper’s specific technical contribution was neither — it was making the whole pipeline trainable end to end through a single differentiable objective, treating the retrieved passage as a latent variable to be marginalized over rather than a fixed input handed to a frozen reader [ 8 ] . Writing x for the input, y for the output, z for a retrieved passage, and η\eta and θ\theta for the retriever’s and generator’s parameters respectively, the RAG-Sequence variant approximates p(y∣x)≈∑z∈top-k(pη(⋅∣x))pη(z∣x) pθ(y∣x,z)p(y \mid x) \approx \sum_{z \in \mathrm{top}\text{-}k\left(p_\eta(\cdot \mid x)\right)} p_\eta(z \mid x) \, p_\theta(y \mid x, z). holding a single retrieved passage fixed…

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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