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arXiv · 2510.05363

MHA-RAG: Improving Efficiency, Accuracy, and Consistency by Encoding Exemplars as Soft Prompts

Abhinav Jain·Xinyu Yao·Thomas Reps·Christopher Jermaine
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Abstract

Adapting Foundation Models to new domains with limited training data is challenging and computationally expensive. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of using domain-specific exemplars as in-context demonstrations, we investigate whether representing exemplars purely as text is the most efficient, effective, and stable approach. We explore an alternative: representing exemplars as soft prompts with an exemplar order invariant model architecture. To this end, we introduce Multi-Head Attention Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MHA-RAG), a framework with the number of attention heads serving as a simple hyperparameter to control soft prompt-generation across different tasks. Across multiple question-answering benchmarks and model scales, MHA-RAG achieves a 20-point performance gain over standard RAG, while cutting inference costs by a factor of 10X GFLOPs-delivering both higher accuracy and greater efficiency, invariant to exemplar order.

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Abhinav Jain, Xinyu Yao, Thomas Reps, Christopher Jermaine. 2025-10-06. MHA-RAG: Improving Efficiency, Accuracy, and Consistency by Encoding Exemplars as Soft Prompts. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05363

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