Papers by Barlas Oguz

20 papers
Multi-Task Retrieval for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Knowledge-intensive tasks require large amounts of knowledge about the world . recent neural retrieval models achieve better results by learning directly from task-specific training data.
Approach: They propose a multi-task trained neural retrieval model that can be universally trained on a wide variety of problems.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms specialised retrievers on a few-shot setting and matches or improves state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks.
CCQA: A New Web-Scale Question Answering Dataset for Model Pre-Training (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to answer open domain questions rely on unlabeled text or synthetically generated question-answer pairs.
Approach: They propose a large-scale open-domain question-answering dataset based on the Common Crawl project that can be used to in-domain pre-train popular language models.
Outcome: The proposed dataset achieves promising results in zero-shot, low resource and fine-tuned settings across multiple tasks, models and benchmarks.
Mixture-of-Supernets: Improving Weight-Sharing Supernet Training with Architecture-Routed Mixture-of-Experts (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Neural architecture search (NAS) uses weight-sharing supernets to generate diverse subnetworks without retraining.
Approach: They propose a weight-sharing supernet that leverages mixture-of-experts to enhance supernet model expressiveness with minimal training overhead.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in NAS for fast machine translation models, surpassing NAS-BERT and AutoDistil across various model sizes.
Joint Verification and Reranking for Open Fact Checking Over Tables (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research into structured data has focused on textual data and the closed-domain setting is not reflective of real-world fact checking tasks.
Approach: They propose a joint reranking-and-verification model which fuses evidence documents in the verification component and a heuristic retrieval baseline.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves comparable performance to the closed-domain state-of-the-art on the TabFact dataset and significantly improves over a heuristic retrieval baseline.
Binary and Ternary Natural Language Generation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: ternary and binary neural networks have proven difficult to optimize since both parameter and output space are discretized . authors demonstrate ternaries and binary models on downstream tasks of summarization and machine translation .
Approach: They propose to use ternary and binary neural networks to optimize for multiplication-free computation . they propose to apply statistics-based quantization for the weights and elastic quantization of the activations to the transformer text generation model.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the best existing models on machine translation tasks.
MLQA: Evaluating Cross-lingual Extractive Question Answering (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Question answering (QA) models have shown rapid progress enabled by the availability of large, high-quality benchmark datasets.
Approach: They present a multi-way aligned extractive QA evaluation benchmark in 7 languages . they evaluate state-of-the-art cross-lingual models and machine-translation-based baselines .
Outcome: The proposed model is based on MLQA, which has over 12K instances in english and 5K in each other language.
CITADEL: Conditional Token Interaction via Dynamic Lexical Routing for Efficient and Effective Multi-Vector Retrieval (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing multi-vector retrieval methods are slower and require more space to store indices compared to their single-vektor counterparts.
Approach: They propose a multi-vector retrieval method that uses dynamic lexical routing to route different token vectors to the predicted lexicals.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets while being nearly 40 times faster than the current state-out-of the-art method.
Bridging the Training-Inference Gap for Dense Phrase Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for building dense retrievers are often misaligned and do not reflect retrieval scenario at inference time.
Approach: They propose a way to validate dense retrievers using a small subset of the entire corpus.
Outcome: The proposed model improves top-1 phrase retrieval accuracy by 2 3 points and top-20 passage retrieval by 2 4 points for open-domain question answering.
Salient Phrase Aware Dense Retrieval: Can a Dense Retriever Imitate a Sparse One? (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing sparse retrievers lack the ability to match salient phrases and rare entities in the query.
Approach: They introduce a dense Lexical Model that can be trained to imitate a sparse one.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms sparse retrievers on a range of tasks including five question answering datasets and the MS MARCO passage retrieval.
Boosted Dense Retriever (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: DrBoost is a dense retrieval ensemble that is trained in stages to correct retrieval mistakes . it produces representations which are 4x more compact, while delivering comparable retrieval results.
Approach: They propose a dense retrieval ensemble inspired by boosting that is trained in stages . they produce representations which are 4x more compact, while delivering comparable retrieval results .
Outcome: The proposed model performs surprisingly well under approximate search with coarse quantization, reducing latency and bandwidth needs by another 4x.
Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Open-domain question answering relies on efficient passage retrieval to select candidate contexts.
Approach: They propose a dual-encoder framework that can be implemented to retrieve passages from a small number of questions and passages.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms a strong Lucene-BM25 system in top-20 passage retrieval accuracy on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks.
LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Several post-training quantization methods have been shown to perform well down to 8-bits.
Approach: They propose a data-free distillation method that leverages generations produced by the pre-trained model to quantize any generative model independent of its training data.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms SoTA PTQ and LLaMA models at low bit precision.
A Study on the Efficiency and Generalization of Light Hybrid Retrievers (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: Recent research focuses on building neural retrievers which learn dense embeddings of query and document into a semantic space.
Approach: They propose to use an indexing-efficient dense retriever to reduce hybrid retrievers' memory by using the state-based indexing algorithm.
Outcome: The proposed hybrid retriever saves 13 memory while maintaining 98.0% performance on out-of-domain datasets and adversarial attacks datasets.
UniK-QA: Unified Representations of Structured and Unstructured Knowledge for Open-Domain Question Answering (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: a recent study aims to answer factual questions using a structured knowledge base (KBQA).
Approach: They propose a unifying approach that homogenizes all knowledge sources by reducing them to text . they demonstrate that UniK-QA is a simple and yet effective way to combine heterogeneous sources of knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves state-of-the-art results on knowledge-base QA tasks by 11 points compared to graph-based methods.
Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed and continue to evolve through scaling.
Approach: They propose a method to train strong long-context LLMs that are capable of utilizing massive context windows of up to 32,000 tokens.
Outcome: The proposed model can surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on long-context benchmarks with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that is free of expensive annotations.
Simple Local Attentions Remain Competitive for Long-Context Tasks (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for NLP tasks require long text sequences beyond the length limit of pretrained models.
Approach: They propose to pretrain large-size NLP models using the same long-doc corpus and fine tune them for real-world long-context tasks.
Outcome: The proposed models can perform better under standard pretraining paradigms than longformer and Longformer.
Domain-matched Pre-training Tasks for Dense Retrieval (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to improve performance of pre-training tasks are needed.
Approach: They propose to pre-train large bi-encoder models on a recently released set of 65 millionsynthetically generated questions and 200 million post-comment pairs from a preexisting reddit conversation dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model can be pre-trained on a set of 65 millionsynthetically generated questions and 200 million post-comment pairs from a preexisting dataset of Reddit conversations.
DRAMA: Diverse Augmentation from Large Language Models to Smaller Dense Retrievers (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong effectiveness and robustness when fine-tuned as dense retrievers.
Approach: They propose a training framework that leverages pruned LLMs to train smaller generalizable dense retrievers.
Outcome: The proposed training framework offers better multilingual and long-context capabilities than traditional encoder-based retrievers and achieves strong performance across multiple tasks and languages.
Text-guided 3D Human Generation from 2D Collections (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: 3D human modeling is used for engaging interaction in gaming, film, and animation. however, the customization of characters is crucial for creativity and scalability.
Approach: They propose a 3D human generation using fashion descriptions to enhance 3D geometry transformation and fine-grained consistency.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate a 3D human, guided by a fashion description, with high efficiency.
How to Train Your Dragon: Diverse Augmentation Towards Generalizable Dense Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing techniques to improve dense retrieval suffer from effectiveness tradeoffs between supervised and zero-shot retrieval, some argue due to the limited model capacity.
Approach: They propose to use diverse queries and sources of supervision to train a generalizable DR to achieve high accuracy in both supervised and zero-shot retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed DR can achieve state-of-the-art in supervised and zero-shot evaluations without increasing model size.

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