Challenge: Existing methods focus on improving in-domain performance, leaving open the question of how they can generalize to out-of-domain and unseen RC tasks.
Approach: They propose a multi-task learning framework that learns the shared representation across different tasks and builds on a large pre-trained language model and fine-tuned on multiple RC datasets.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the BERT-Large baseline by 8.39 and 7.22 respectively.

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Challenge: Existing methods for QA are hampered by increased training costs . current methods suffer significant performance degradation when applied to out-of-domain examples.
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D-NET: A Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Framework for Improving the Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-58)

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Challenge: MRC requires machines to understand text and answer questions about the text.
Approach: They propose a simple system Baidu submitted for MRQA 2019 Shared Task that focused on generalization of machine reading comprehension (MRC) models.
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What do Models Learn from Question Answering Datasets? (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models have outperformed humans on question answering datasets, but they have yet to outperform humans on the task of question answering itself.
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Multi-Domain Multilingual Question Answering (2021.emnlp-tutorials)

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Challenge: Question answering (QA) is one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing.
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Exploring Language Model Generalization in Low-Resource Extractive QA (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed domains such as medicine and law . current LLM performance in closed domain is lacking, even on traditional tasks such as Natural Language Inference .
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Table Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Table Question Answering (TQA) aims to answer natural language questions using tabular data.
Approach: They propose a systematic overview of TQA research using large language models and summarize available benchmarks based on task features.
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Test-Time Self-Adaptive Small Language Models for Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent instruction-finetuned large language models (LMs) have shown notable performances in various tasks, such as question-answering.
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Technical Question Answering across Tasks and Domains (2021.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing methods for technical QA have a limited data size and question and answer overlaps .
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Question Answering Infused Pre-training of General-Purpose Contextualized Representations (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing pretraining objectives for question answering (QA) are not optimized for being immediately useful without fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose a pre-training objective based on question answering (QA) that is based more directly on context.
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Can Generative Pre-trained Language Models Serve As Knowledge Bases for Closed-book QA? (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work is limited in using small benchmarks with high test-train overlaps.
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