DRAG: Distilling RAG for SLMs from LLMs to Transfer Knowledge and Mitigate Hallucination via Evidence and Graph-based Distillation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have proven highly effective for tasks requiring factual consistency and robust knowledge retrieval. However, large-scale RAG systems consume significant computational resources and are prone to generating hallucinated content from Humans. In this work, we introduce $\texttt{DRAG}$, a novel framework for distilling RAG knowledge from large-scale Language Models (LLMs) into small LMs (SLMs). Our approach leverages evidence- and knowledge graph-based distillation, ensuring that the distilled model retains critical factual knowledge while significantly reducing model size and computational cost. By aligning the smaller model's predictions with a structured knowledge graph and ranked evidence, $\texttt{DRAG}$ effectively mitigates hallucinations and improves factual accuracy. We further present a case demonstrating how our framework mitigates user privacy risks and introduce a corresponding benchmark. Experimental evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the prior competitive RAG methods like MiniRAG for SLMs by up to 27.7% using the same models, preserving high-level efficiency and reliability. With $\texttt{DRAG}$, we provide a practical and resource-efficient roadmap to deploying enhanced retrieval and generation capabilities in small-sized LLMs.

@article{chen2025_2506.01954,
  title={ DRAG: Distilling RAG for SLMs from LLMs to Transfer Knowledge and Mitigate Hallucination via Evidence and Graph-based Distillation },
  author={ Jennifer Chen and Aidar Myrzakhan and Yaxin Luo and Hassaan Muhammad Khan and Sondos Mahmoud Bsharat and Zhiqiang Shen },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.01954},
  year={ 2025 }
}