Papers by Pat Verga
To Adapt or to Annotate: Challenges and Interventions for Domain Adaptation in Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in open-domain question answering have demonstrated impressive accuracy on general-purpose domains like Wikipedia. |
| Approach: | They propose a more realistic end-to-end domain shift evaluation setting covering five diverse domains to assess model adaption. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves by 24 points when adapted to unsupervised datasets. |
MuRAG: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generator for Open Question Answering over Images and Text (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models store a massive amount of world knowledge implicitly in their parameters, but large models often fail to encode information about rare entities and events. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented model which accesses an external non-parametric memory to augment language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by 10-20% absolute on two datasets and under distractor and full-wiki settings. |
Multilingual Arbitration: Optimizing Data Pools to Accelerate Multilingual Progress (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Synthetic data generation relies on a single oracle teacher model, which can lead to model collapse and bias propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual arbitration approach that exploits performance variations among multiple models for each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses single-teacher distillation with 80% win rates over proprietary and open-weight models with the largest improvements in low-resource languages. |
Augmenting Pre-trained Language Models with QA-Memory for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for open-domain question-answering use an open book approach . a recent alternative is to retrieve from a collection of previously-generated question-annwer pairs . |
| Approach: | They propose a new QA system that augments a text-to-text model with a large memory of question-answer pairs and a task for the latent step of question retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms closed-book QA and can answer multi-hop questions. |
FLARE: Faithful Logic-Aided Reasoning and Exploration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern Question Answering (QA) and Reasoning approaches with Large Language Models (LLMs) use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting but struggle with ambiguous tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses large language models to plan solutions and formalize queries without external solvers to generate outputs faithful to their intermediate reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves SOTA results on 7 out of 9 diverse reasoning benchmarks and 3 out of 3 logic inference benchmarks while enabling measurement of reasoning faithfulness. |
Faithful to the Document or to the World? Mitigating Hallucinations via Entity-Linked Knowledge in Abstractive Summarization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing abstractive summarization systems are hampered by content hallucinations in which models generate text that is not directly inferable from the source alone. |
| Approach: | They propose to use external knowledge to latently connect entities and concepts to latences to lend provenance to many of these unfaithful yet factual entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to improve the factuality of summarizations without simply making them more extractive. |
Adaptable and Interpretable Neural MemoryOver Symbolic Knowledge (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Past research has shown that large neural language models encode surprising amounts of factual information, but augmenting or modifying this information requires modifying a corpus and retraining, which is computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural LM that includes an interpretable neuro-symbolic KB in the form of a "fact memory" their LM improves performance on knowledge-intensive question-answering tasks, sometimes dramatically . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on knowledge-intensive question-answering tasks, including a 27 point increase in one setting of WebQuestionsSP over a state-of-the-art open-book model. |