Papers by Hannaneh Hajishirzi
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for multi-hop reading comprehension decompose compositional questions into simpler sub-questions . authors propose a system that learns to break compositional multi- hop questions into simple singlehop sub-question . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that decomposes a compositional question into simpler sub-questions . they propose recast subquestion generation as a span prediction problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates as effective as human-authored sub-questions using 400 examples . it also provides explainable evidence for its decision making in the form of sub-questions . |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to condition models on a concise rationale are less accurate than models that can use the entire context. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize a bound on the Information Bottleneck objective to extract concise rationales from a binary mask and an end-task predictor that uses only the residual sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing norm-minimization techniques in task performance and agreement with human rationales in the ERASER benchmark. |
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| Challenge: | Existing fact verification datasets with crowdsourced claims introduce subtle biases that are difficult to control for. |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale fact verification dataset with ambiguous questions . they use a corpus of 188k claims to construct false and true claims . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms models trained on the dataset FEVER or in-domain data by up to 17% absolute. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with tasks requiring rich world knowledge, implying the difficulty of encoding a wealth of world knowledge in their parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmentation method that improves performance and reduces inference costs by only retrieving non-parametric memories when necessary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance and reduces inference costs by only retrieving non-parametric memories when necessary. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work has adapted vision-and-language models to generative tasks like image captioning. |
| Approach: | They propose an extension to LXMERT with training refinements to generate images from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate images from pieces of text while still being comparable to existing models. |
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| Challenge: | In information-seeking conversations, a user may ask questions that are under-specified or unanswerable. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset for information-seeking conversations with mixed-initiative interactions . they use Wikipedia to search for answers and provide relevant information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system significantly underperforms humans in two of the most recent studies. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for conversational question answering require specific retrievers to understand user questions. |
| Approach: | They develop a query rewriting model CONQRR that rewrites a conversational question into a standalone question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on an open-domain conversational question answering dataset and is effective for two different off-the shelf retrievers. |
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| Challenge: | Question answering (QA) tasks have been posed using a variety of formats . a new study aims to develop specialized QA models that can be used to train QA systems . |
| Approach: | They build a pre-trained question answering model that performs well across 19 QA datasets . they argue that format-specialized models can limit the ability to teach reasoning . |
| Outcome: | a new model that trains on QA datasets performs on par with 8 models trained on individual datasets . a single model that trained on UNIFIEDQA performs well on 19 QA data . |
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets in this domain do not offer precise operational annotations over diverse problem types due to noise and lack of formal operation-based representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation language to map problems to their operation programs . they also introduce an interpretable neural math problem solver . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and the AQUA-RAT dataset on the AQuA-rat dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain question answering models require multiple documents on-demand for every input query. |
| Approach: | They propose query-agnostic indexable representations of document phrases that can drastically speed up open-domain question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained and deployed even in a single 4-GPU server. |
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| Challenge: | Prior work shows training models on multitask data augmented with task descriptions transfers knowledge to new tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use unlabeled target-task data to train models on task descriptions . they use only 2% of the data from the P3 pool without labeled target task data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on 12 out of 14 datasets . it also provides better initialization than single model on target-task data . |
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| Challenge: | Existing reading comprehension tasks focus on questions for which the contexts provide all the information required to answer them, thus not evaluating a system’s performance at identifying a potential lack of sufficient information and locating sources for that information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset with 13K questions over paragraphs from English Wikipedia that provide only partial information to answer them, with the missing information occurring in one or more linked documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 31.1% F1 on the reading comprehension task, while estimated human performance is 88.4%. |
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| Challenge: | Existing question answering datasets assume all questions have well defined answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a QA dataset containing a distribution of false presuppositions . they find that 25% of questions contain false presumptions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model finds that 25% of questions contain false presuppositions . the model can find presuffpositions moderately well, but struggle when predicting correctness . |
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| Challenge: | Existing QA models rely on learning interaction between document and question . current models require explicit attention to the document before or as it reads it . |
| Approach: | They propose a modular question answering task that enforces complete independence of the document encoder from the question encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves reasonable accuracy but significantly underperforms unconstrained QA models. |
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| Challenge: | elaborations are generated using language models that generate background knowledge that helps improve performance . human evaluations show that the quality of the generated ellaborations is high . |
| Approach: | They propose to finetune smaller language models to generate useful intermediate context . they compare a language model with an answer predictor and generate elaborations . human evaluations show that the quality of the generated ellaborations is high . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms other models on commonsense questions on four commons sense benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Contextual language models have attracted great interest in probing what is encoded in their representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a probing model that evaluates how effective are text-only representations in distinguishing between matching and non-matching visual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms text-only language models in instance retrieval, but underperform humans. |
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| Challenge: | Large-scale vision language models use Transformers to perform cross-modal interactions . state-of-the-art models are memory intensive and expensive due to quadratic complexity . |
| Approach: | They propose a token reduction framework that uses text-informed Pruning and modality-aware Merging strategies to progressively reduce the tokens of input image and text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference speed and memory footprint on four vision language tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to natural language processing rely on fixed artifacts such as language models . current studies have focused on how these models acquire and demonstrate knowledge . |
| Approach: | They apply probing techniques to examine how language models acquire knowledge . they aim to inform future work on more efficient pretraining and understanding dependencies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns linguistic abstractions, factual and commonsense knowledge, and reasoning abilities fast, stably, and robustly across domains. |
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| Challenge: | Recent NLP models have shown the remarkable ability to generalise ‘zero-shot’ to new tasks using only natural language instructions as guidance. |
| Approach: | They introduce Hypernetworks for INstruction Tuning (HINT) which converts task instructions and examples into parameter-efficient modules inserted into an underlying model using a pretrained text encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform strong state-of-the-art models by over 10% when controlling for compute. |
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for information extraction use a pipeline approach to identify entities and then use the detected entity spans for relation extraction and coreference resolution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for several information extraction tasks that share span representations using dynamically constructed span graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art on multiple information extraction tasks across multiple datasets reflecting different domains. |
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| Challenge: | tracing language models' outputs back to training data is a problem because they are trained on text corpora with trillions of tokens . existing methods for tracers have not been scaled to work within this multi-trillion-token setting . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that traces language models' outputs verbatim back to training data . OLMOTRACE retrieves documents from the model's training data that contain exact matches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can find verbatim matches between LM output and training data . it can be used to explore fact checking, hallucination, and creativity of language models . |
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| Challenge: | Existing language models (LMs) predict tokens with a softmax over a finite vocabulary, which can make it difficult to predict rare tokens or phrases. |
| Approach: | They introduce a nonparametric masked language model that replaces a softmax with a distribution over every phrase in a reference corpus and uses an in-batch approximation to train it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms larger parametric models on 16 tasks including classification, fact probing and question answering. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating text with structured inputs are expensive and require manual annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph transforming encoder which leverages relational structure of knowledge graphs without imposing linearization or hierarchical constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system produces more informative texts than competing methods. |
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| Challenge: | Large pretrained language models (PLMs) can achieve near-human performance on commonsense reasoning tasks, but provide little human-interpretable evidence of the underlying reasoning they use. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large pretrained language models to generate evidence for commonsense reasoning NLP tasks . they use models to contrast alternative explanations based on key attribute(s) required to justify the correct answer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on two commonsense reasoning benchmarks compared to previous non-contrastive alternatives. |
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| Challenge: | Social value alignment is the ability to create agents that act in alignment with socially beneficial norms and values in interactive narratives or text-based games. |
| Approach: | They introduce a game-value ALignment agent that uses social commonsense to restrict its action space to actions that are aligned with socially beneficial values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves state-of-the-art task performance by 4% while reducing the frequency of socially harmful behaviors by 25% compared to strong contemporary value alignment approaches. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models can do in-context learning by conditioning on a few training examples with no parameter updates or task-specific templates. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-training framework where a pretrained language model is tuned to do in-context learning on a large set of training tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on 142 NLP datasets and a range of target tasks with domain shifts. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot learning are based on in-context training, but performance drops when no demonstrations are available. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method that constructs pseudo-demonstrations for a given test input using a raw text corpus and applies techniques to reduce copying. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous zero-shot methods on nine classification datasets and is on par with in-context learning with labeled training data in the few-shot setting. |
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| Challenge: | Standardized tests have been proposed as replacements to the Turing test as a driver for progress in AI. |
| Approach: | et al. propose standardized tests as replacements to the Turing test as a driver for progress in AI. |
| Outcome: | a series of standardized tests have been proposed as replacements to the Turing test . the tutorial categorizes open domain and closed domain tests into two categories . open domain tests require the system to have significant domain knowledge and reasoning capabilities. |
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have evaluated a few steering methods for language models, leaving gaps in understanding their robustness. |
| Approach: | They examine three steering methods for language models to examine their reliability . they use function vectors, task vectors and DoLa to steer models toward desirable outputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that they are not robust enough to handle large models with large parameters. |
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| Challenge: | Conventional datasets and methods for information extraction focus on within-sentence relations from general Newswire text. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level IE dataset that integrates automatic and human annotations to annotate entities and document- level N-ary relation identification from scientific articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset extends state-of-the-art IE models to document-level IE. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting distributional robustness fail to generalize reliably in a variety of test conditions. |
| Approach: | They conduct a large empirical evaluation to investigate the landscape of distributional robustness in question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are more robust to distribution shifts than fully fine-tuned models, and few-shot prompt models exhibit better robustness than few- shot prompt models. |
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| Challenge: | Communicating with humans is challenging for AIs because of its complexity and multimodality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a game of drawing and guessing based on Pictionary to test AIs' understanding of the world and multi-modal gestures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game is a test for mixing language and visual/symbolic communication in AI. |
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| Challenge: | Large “instruction-tuned” language models depend heavily on human-written instruction data . this limited quantity, diversity, and creativity hinders the generality of the tuned model . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for improving instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off their own generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing public instruction datasets by 5% . it generates instructions, input, and output samples, then filters invalid or similar ones . |
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| Challenge: | Modern language models are trained on text data downsampled from massive text corpora like Common Crawl. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient and scalable system that can make petabyte-level text corpora searchable by using the FM-index data structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system indexes 83TB of Internet text in 99 days with a single 128-core CPU node (or 19 hours if using 137 such nodes). |
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge grounding models focus on locating knowledge in document contexts that are relevant to the conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge identification model that leverages document structure to provide dialogue-contextualized passage encodings and better locate knowledge relevant to the conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be applied to document-grounded conversational datasets and shows generalization to unseen documents and long dialogue contexts. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in few-shot generalization in natural language processing focus on English. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that unifies 15 diverse tasks across 54 languages in a sequence-to-sequence format and provides a fixed set of few-shot examples and instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies 15 diverse tasks across 54 languages in a sequence-to-sequence format and provides a fixed set of few-shot examples and instructions. |
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| Challenge: | Existing largescale datasets explicitly exclude compound figures . existing systems lack this ability to identify relevant subfigures . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of medical images in context that allows figure-to-text alignment . they use captions, inline references and manually annotated subfigures for compound figures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates the utility of inline references in image-text matching. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models claim to perform better on tasks measuring model capabilities, but there is no standard setup for reproducible evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a document that is documented and practical for reproducible LLM evaluations and includes recommendations from existing literature and new experiments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed standard identifies and reviews the varying factors in evaluation practices adopted by the community, such as prompt formatting, choice of in-context examples, probability normalizations, and task formulation. |
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| Challenge: | Generating diverse sequences exhibit semantically one-to-many relationships between source and target sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose to separate diversification from generation using a general plug-and-play module that wraps around and guides an existing encoder-decoder model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that diversification and generation are separate steps in the same model and that the model is robust. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work in NLP has shown that knowing task relationships via pairwise task transfer improves choosing one or more source tasks that help to learn a new target task. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify task relationships via pairwise task transfer and build smaller training sets that improve zero-shot performances across 11 different target tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves overall rankings and top-k precision of source tasks by 10% and 38%, respectively. |
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| Challenge: | a single-hop reasoning model can solve much more of the dataset than previously thought. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-hop BERT-based RC model that achieves 67 F1 . they propose an evaluation setting where humans are not shown all paragraphs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 67 F1—comparable to state-of-the-art multi-hop models. |
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| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering systems often require large memory to run because of the massive size of their passage index. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-efficient neural retrieval model that integrates a learning-to-hash technique into the state-of-the-art Dense Passage Retriever to represent the passage index using compact binary codes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly reduces memory cost from 65GB to 2GB without loss of accuracy on two open-domain question answering benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows the surprising power of continuous prompts to language models for controlled generation and solving a wide range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract a discrete (textual) interpretation of continuous prompts faithful to the problem they solve. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can find prompts that solve a task while being projected to an arbitrary text with a smaller drop in accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained models are capable of few-shot in-context learning (ICL) however, concatenated demonstrations are often excessively long and require additional computation. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply fusion-in-decoder (FiD) models to perform few-shot in-context learning (ICL) they propose to use concatenation-based, early-fusion, intermediate- and late-fusion methods to improve efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform concatenation-based models on 11 held-out tasks. |
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| Challenge: | In this tutorial, we will introduce document-level representation learning techniques . document-based learning is challenging due to the limited sequence length of many models . |
| Approach: | They will provide an overview of established long sequence NLP techniques and discuss memory-saving methods that are key to processing long sequences. |
| Outcome: | The tutorial will introduce the latest and ongoing techniques for document-level representation learning. |
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| Challenge: | Prior work on counterfactual data augmentation only considered restricted classes of perturbations, limiting their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented framework for creating diverse counterfactual perturbations for CDA. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on natural language inference and sentiment analysis show that the proposed framework can be used to encourage diversity in manually authored perturbations. |
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| Challenge: | OpenAI’s o1 model showed this capability but did not publicly share its methodology, leading to many replication efforts. |
| Approach: | They curate a small dataset s1K with 1,000 reasoning questions based on three criteria we validate through ablations: difficulty, diversity, and quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exceeds o1-preview on competition math questions by up to 27% (MATH and AIME24). |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on question answering tasks only provide weak supervision for how the answer should be computed . weak supervision is attractive because it is relatively easy to gather, allowing for large datasets . but weak supervision complicates learning because there are many different spurious ways to derive the correct answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to convert question answering tasks into discrete latent variable learning problems with a precomputed set of possible solutions that contains one correct option. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous methods on six QA tasks and achieves state-of-the-art on five of them. |
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| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) are trained on web text originating from many points in time and, in general, without any explicit temporal grounding. |
| Approach: | They construct a time-sensitive question dataset and use it to examine temporal alignment methods to align their internal knowledge to a target time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve LLaMa2's performance by 62% if they are fine tuned to the year 2022 . |
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| Challenge: | Evaluating the factuality of long-form text generated by large language models (LMs) is non-trivial because (1) generations often contain a mixture of supported and unsupported pieces of information, making binary judgments of quality inadequate and (2) human evaluation is time-consuming and costly. |
| Approach: | They introduce a new evaluation that breaks a generation into a series of atomic facts and computes the percentage of atom facts supported by a reliable knowledge source. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model breaks a generation into atomic facts and computes the percentage of atomic fact supported by a reliable knowledge source. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment retrieval-augmented generation models with retrievers often rely on spurious cues or generate hallucinations during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate evidentiality of passages into training a retrieval-augmented generation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms its direct counterpart on all knowledge-intensive tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Current methods for training language models with human feedback rely on subjective preferences that are assumed to account for an "average" user . however, annotating preferences is inherently subjective and results in generic models that generate outputs not preferred by many user groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to personalize preference optimization in LMs by contextualizing the probability distribution of model outputs with the preference provider. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance by focusing on group-level preferences rather than individual feedback. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for commonsense reasoning rely on high-quality knowledge, but they are often dominated by large-scale pretrained models that are fine-tuned on a target benchmark. |
| Approach: | They develop generated knowledge prompting which generates knowledge from a language model and provides it as additional input when answering a question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves state-of-the-art models on four commonsense reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Several methods have been proposed to improve the inference efficiency of transformer-based models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new adaptive inference method that takes into account the hardness of input samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or complements existing per-sample adaptive inference methods in terms of accuracy vs. FLOPs and can be applied to compressed and efficient transformer encoders to further improve their efficiency. |
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for named entity recognition, relation extraction, and event extraction can be easily adapted for new tasks or datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enumerates, refins, and scores text spans to capture local (within-sentence) and global (cross-sentent) context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on four datasets from a variety of domains. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on literal copying, but current methods reduce literal copy but not non-literal copying. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to measure literal and non-literal copying in LMs . they use copyrighted fiction books as text sources to assess literal copying . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model measures literal and non-literal copying in copyrighted texts . large models show significantly more copying, with literal copying rates increasing . |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on information extraction from semi-structured websites has relied on manual data annotation and learning a model specific to a given template. |
| Approach: | They propose a solution for “zero-shot” open-domain relation extraction from webpages with previously unseen templates using a graph neural network-based approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides a 31% gain over baseline for zero-shot extraction in a new subject vertical. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models that learn intents from labeled data are complicated and require a vast number of annotated examples to train a model. |
| Approach: | They propose a general-purpose task-aware retrieval system with instructions that can adapt to a new task without any parameter updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms two benchmarks on a set of domains and tasks on X2-Retrieval. |
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| Challenge: | Despite the success of supervised learning, models often struggle with generalization across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use crowdsourcing instructions to build a model that learns a new task by understanding the human-readable instructions that define it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn from seen tasks and generalize to unseen tasks given its natural crowdsourcing instructions. |
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| Challenge: | Current state-of-the-art machine readers do not support case-based reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that extracts a set of similar cases from a nonparametric memory and then predicts an answer by selecting the span in the test context that is most similar to the contextualized representations of answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on NaturalQuestions and NewsQA by 11.5 and 8.4 EM. |
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| Challenge: | Standard test sets for supervised learning evaluate in-distribution generalization but are misleading when a dataset has systematic gaps. |
| Approach: | They propose a more rigorous annotation paradigm for NLP that helps to close systematic gaps in the test data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly lower on contrast sets than on the original test sets—up to 25% in some cases. |
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| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction systems are designed for within-sentence relations, but extracting information from scientific articles requires relations across sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task setup for identifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles . they develop a unified framework called SciIE with shared span representations to solve this problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models without domain-specific features in scientific information extraction. |
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| Challenge: | Learning from human feedback has enabled the alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hybrid Preference routER that defers an annotation to either humans or LMs, achieving better annotation quality while reducing the cost of human-only annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better annotation quality while reducing the cost of human-only annotation. |
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| Challenge: | Getting machines to "understand" text is a vast and long-standing problem, made more challenging by the fact that it is not even clear what it means to understand text. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-based approach to machine reading comprehension that uses a natural language question to test a system's comprehension of a passage of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed questions have surface cues or other biases that allow a model to shortcut the intended reasoning process. |
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| Challenge: | Using reframing techniques, we find that instructional prompts are easier to follow for Language Models (LMs) |
| Approach: | They propose reframing techniques for manual reformulation of prompts into more effective ones . they compare performance of LMs prompted with reframed instructions on 12 NLP tasks . |
| Outcome: | The reframing techniques used for prompt reformulation improve performance on 12 tasks . the techniques boost performance on LMs with different sizes compared with original prompts . |
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| Challenge: | Large datasets have become commonplace in NLP research, but the emphasis on quantity has made it challenging to assess the quality of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based tool to characterize and diagnose large datasets . they leverage the behavior of the model on individual instances during training . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four datasets show that the tool can characterize and diagnose datasets with a model-based tool. |
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| Challenge: | a dataset of 40k information-seeking questions across seven languages is used to answer multilingual question answering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task framework that allows questions from one language to be answered via answer content from another language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to answer questions from one language to another . the dataset was built on 40K questions across 7 languages, but could not find same-language answers . |
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-augmented reasoning methods fail to capture the *introspective* nature of knowledge required in commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to develop an introspective commonsense reasoner that introspects for knowledge statements related to the given question and makes an informed prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard supervised finetuning and chain-of-thought distilled methods and enhances the transparency of the commonsense reasoning process. |
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| Challenge: | Adapting general-purpose language models to new skills is currently expensive . Adaptation to new skill sets requires repeated training or models forget older skills . |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel-train-then-merge procedure that adds new skills to preexisting models in isolation and later merges with the general model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is cheaper than retraining models on updated datasets . it improves model compliance with safe prompts while preserving model's ability to refuse dangerous or harmful prompts. |
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| Challenge: | Evaluating reward models presents an opportunity to understand the opaque technologies used for alignment of language models. |
| Approach: | They present a benchmark dataset and code-base for evaluation of reward models . they use prompt-chosen-rejected trios to benchmark how they perform on queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset compares RMs with other models on a set of questions. |
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| Challenge: | COVID-19 has spawned a diverse body of scientific literature that is challenging to navigate . researchers are using automated tools to help find useful knowledge . |
| Approach: | They develop a schema to extract mechanism relations from scientific papers . their search engine, dataset and code are publicly available . |
| Outcome: | The proposed schema outperforms PubMed search in clinical trials. |
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models often generate inconsistent summaries containing factual errors or fabricated content. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate representative examples of non-factual summaries through infilling language models and train a robust fact-correction model to post-edit them to improve factual consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous methods in correcting factual errors on two popular summarization datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Prior work has suggested methods for finding better prompt or scoring of the output from the model. |
| Approach: | They propose a noisy channel approach for language model prompting in few-shot text classification by in-context demonstration or prompt tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms direct models in both demonstration and prompt tuning. |
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| Challenge: | SciFact is a dataset of 1.4K expert-written scientific claims paired with evidence-containing abstracts annotated with labels and rationales. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset of 1.4K scientific claims paired with evidence-containing abstracts annotated with labels and rationales to test their system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can verify claims related to COVID-19 by identifying evidence from the CORD-19 corpus. |
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain question answering systems assume questions have a single welldefined answer. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-domain question answering task which involves finding every plausible answer and rewriting the question for each one to resolve the ambiguity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a dataset covering 14,042 open-domain questions . it shows that strong models benefit from weakly supervised learning . |
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| Challenge: | Existing phrase retrieval models suffer from low accuracy due to limited scalability and speed . 'Open-domain question answering' is a task of answering generic factoid questions by looking up a large knowledge source, typically unstructured text corpora such as Wikipedia. |
| Approach: | They aim to augment existing phrase retrieval models with contextualized sparse representations to improve the quality of each phrase embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves CuratedTREC and SQuAD-Open by 4% and 45x faster inference speeds over the existing model. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research shows that relevant knowledge can provide useful context for commonsense tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns to generate contextually relevant knowledge in response to given questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows consistent gains over 9 commonsense benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing research on niche answer types, mainly short responses and, in a few cases, long responses, has failed to adequately address the answer diversity of questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Google's autocomplete feature to collect questions from a large-scale dataset with a variety of answer types to facilitate further research on improving QA with diverse response types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces naturalistic questions that are short and expressed using simple language. |
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| Challenge: | a recent study has found that preference learning is a key tool for enhancing LLM training and alignment. |
| Approach: | They use a synthetic data generation pipeline to generate 48,000 unique instruction-following prompts with 23 verifiable constraints to obtain preference pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates 48,000 unique instruction-following prompts with 23 verifiable constraints that enable fine-grained and automated quality assessments of model responses. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models can in-context learn by conditioning on a few input-label pairs and making predictions for new inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ground truth demonstrations to replace labels in demonstrations . they also show that other aspects of the demonstrations are key drivers of endtask performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms zeroshot inference on a wide range of tasks using ground truth demonstrations. |
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| Challenge: | Current scientific claim verification systems can achieve very strong performance on limited contexts, in some cases approaching human agreement. |
| Approach: | They propose to pool and annotate top predictions from four state-of-the-art scientific claim verification models to evaluate their performance against large corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs well on a corpus of 500K scientific abstracts. |
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| Challenge: | Despite the advances of language models, they still produce text that contains trivial commonsense errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a general-purpose commonsense statement verification model that learns to estimate the plausibility of declarative statements based on commonsensical knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models that can be repurposed for commonsense verification, even including GPT-3.5/ChatGPT/GPT-4. |
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| Challenge: | a new multi-task, parameter-efficient language model tuning method learns to transfer knowledge across different tasks via a mixture of soft prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task, parameter-efficient language model tuning method that uses soft prompts to learn to transfer knowledge across different tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms prompt tuning and outperfies or matches fully fine-tuned tuning approaches that use 10 times more parameters. |
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| Challenge: | a new approach to scientific claim verification uses a document-level fact-checking label to label scientific documents . a multitask approach combines a shared encoding of the claim and document context . |
| Approach: | They propose a system which predicts a fact-checking label and identifies rationales in a multitask fashion based on a shared encoding of the claim and full document context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on three scientific claim verification datasets . it can learn from instances annotated with a document-level fact-checking label, but lacking sentence-level rationales based on the datasets. |
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| Challenge: | a tutorial explores the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address information extraction from the World Wide Web. |
| Approach: | This tutorial examines methods for extracting information from the World Wide Web . it explores the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address these different forms of text . |
| Outcome: | This paper examines the commonalities in the challenges and solutions developed to address the World Wide Web. |
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| Challenge: | Long short term memory units are powerful tools for language modeling, but their performance can be limited by the number of parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a pyramidal recurrent unit which enables learning representations in high dimensional space with more generalization power and fewer parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with different gating mechanisms and transformations on word-level language modeling tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-answer retrieval cannot reason about the set of passages jointly. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint passage retrieval model focusing on reranking to solve multi-answer retrieval problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on three multi-answer datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on improving the consistency of comparison questions . current models show inconsistent comparison predictions due to small datasets . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates logic rules and neural models to improve the accuracy of comparison questions by enhancing labeled training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves state-of-the-art models on WIQA and QuaRel and reduces consistency violations by 58% on HotpotQA. |
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| Challenge: | Existing event extraction systems are limited in their accuracy due to the lack of available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for self-training event extraction systems by bootstrapping additional training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on ACE 2005 and TAC-KBP 2015 datasets. |
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| Challenge: | ScIRIFF is the only entirely expert-written instruction-following dataset for scientific literature understanding . it features complex instructions with long input contexts, detailed task descriptions, and structured outputs. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset of 137K instruction-following instances for training and evaluation . they finetuned large language models using a mix of general domain and ScIRIFF instructions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that on nine out-of-distribution held-out tasks, the model performs better than baselines trained on general domain instructions. |