Papers by Patrick Lewis
A Few More Examples May Be Worth Billions of Parameters (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on few-shot learning for natural language tasks explores the dynamics of scaling up either the number of model parameters or labeled examples while controlling for the other variable by setting it to a constant. |
| Approach: | They explore the dynamics of scaling up the number of model parameters versus the number labeled examples across a wide variety of tasks. |
| Outcome: | The results show that scaling parameters yields performance improvements, while adding examples does not. |
Reasoning over Public and Private Data in Retrieval-Based Systems (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval systems assume relevant corpora are fully (e.g., publicly) accessible, but users are often unwilling to expose their private data to entities hosting public data. |
| Approach: | They propose a split iterative retrieval problem involving iterating retrieval over multiple privacy scopes and propose 'concurrentQA' benchmark to test this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the existing retrieval methods but still suffers performance degradations when applied to a dataset from a public and private distribution. |
Interpretation of Natural Language Rules in Conversational Machine Reading (D18-1)
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Marzieh Saeidi, Max Bartolo, Patrick Lewis, Sameer Singh, Tim Rocktäschel, Mike Sheldon, Guillaume Bouchard, Sebastian Riedel
| Challenge: | Existing work on question answering problems requires the reading of text because it contains a recipe to derive an answer together with the reader’s background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They formalise a task and develop a crowd-sourcing strategy to collect 37k task instances based on real-world rules and crowd-generated questions and scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on 37k task instances based in real-world rules and crowd-generated questions and scenarios. |
Mini-Model Adaptation: Efficiently Extending Pretrained Models to New Languages via Aligned Shallow Training (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to pretrain Masked Language Models (MLMs) are expensive and require a full forward and backward pass over the entire model. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a shallow mini-model from a fraction of a large model's parameters and plug it into a larger model for rapid cross-lingual transfer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on XNLI, MLQA and PAWS-X show that mini-model adaptation matches the standard approach using up to 2.3x less compute on average. |
PAQ: 65 Million Probably-Asked Questions and What You Can Do With Them (2021.tacl-1)
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Patrick Lewis, Yuxiang Wu, Linqing Liu, Pasquale Minervini, Heinrich Küttler, Aleksandra Piktus, Pontus Stenetorp, Sebastian Riedel
| Challenge: | Open-domain Question Answering models that directly leverage question-answer (QA) pairs show promise in terms of speed and memory compared with conventional models which retrieve and read from text corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answer (QA)-pair retriever to facilitate improved QA-patch models by introducing Probably Asked Questions (PAQ) they propose QA pair retriever, RePAQ, which preempts and caches test questions, enabling it to match the accuracy of recent retrieve-and-read models, whilst being significantly faster. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models by 5% but trails RePAQ by 15% . it can be configured for size (under 500MB) or speed (over 1K questions per second) while retaining high accuracy. |
Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing (2021.emnlp-demo)
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Quentin Lhoest, Albert Villanova del Moral, Yacine Jernite, Abhishek Thakur, Patrick von Platen, Suraj Patil, Julien Chaumond, Mariama Drame, Julien Plu, Lewis Tunstall, Joe Davison, Mario Šaško, Gunjan Chhablani, Bhavitvya Malik, Simon Brandeis, Teven Le Scao, Victor Sanh, Canwen Xu, Nicolas Patry, Angelina McMillan-Major, Philipp Schmid, Sylvain Gugger, Clément Delangue, Théo Matussière, Lysandre Debut, Stas Bekman, Pierric Cistac, Thibault Goehringer, Victor Mustar, François Lagunas, Alexander Rush, Thomas Wolf
| Challenge: | Contemporary NLP systems use many different datasets at significantly varying scale and level of annotation. |
| Approach: | a community library for contemporary NLP is available at https://github.com/datasets . the library includes more than 650 unique datasets and has more than 250 contributors a year after its initial development . |
| Outcome: | the library includes more than 650 unique datasets and has more than 250 contributors . it supports a variety of cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks . |
On the Challenges of Using Black-Box APIs for Toxicity Evaluation in Research (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Perception of toxicity evolves over time and differs between geographies and cultural backgrounds. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a more structured approach to evaluating toxicity over time . they suggest that research that relied on automatic toxicity scores may have resulted in inaccurate results. |
| Outcome: | The Perspective API has been updated to reflect the changes in toxicity scores. |
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. |
Language Models as Knowledge Bases? (D19-1)
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Fabio Petroni, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, Patrick Lewis, Anton Bakhtin, Yuxiang Wu, Alexander Miller
| Challenge: | Recent advances in pretraining language models on large textual corpora led to a surge of improvements for downstream NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They present a method for pretraining language models on large textual corpora . they find that they can store relational knowledge and answer queries structured as "fill-in-the-blank" queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language models can recall factual knowledge without fine-tuning without fine tuning . the proposed models can answer queries structured as "fill-in-the-blank" cloze statements . |
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. |
Salient Phrase Aware Dense Retrieval: Can a Dense Retriever Imitate a Sparse One? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Xilun Chen, Kushal Lakhotia, Barlas Oguz, Anchit Gupta, Patrick Lewis, Stan Peshterliev, Yashar Mehdad, Sonal Gupta, Wen-tau Yih
| 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. |
Unsupervised Question Answering by Cloze Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets only available for limited domains and languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate context, question and answer triples in an unsupervised manner and synthesize extractive QA training data automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing QA models on a common EQA benchmark dataset. |
Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions (2023.findings-acl)
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Akari Asai, Timo Schick, Patrick Lewis, Xilun Chen, Gautier Izacard, Sebastian Riedel, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Wen-tau Yih
| 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. |
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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Vladimir Karpukhin, Barlas Oguz, Sewon Min, Patrick Lewis, Ledell Wu, Sergey Edunov, Danqi Chen, Wen-tau Yih
| 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. |
KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks (2021.naacl-main)
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Fabio Petroni, Aleksandra Piktus, Angela Fan, Patrick Lewis, Majid Yazdani, Nicola De Cao, James Thorne, Yacine Jernite, Vladimir Karpukhin, Jean Maillard, Vassilis Plachouras, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel
| Challenge: | Existing models for knowledge-intensive language tasks require access to large, external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILT) they test a shared dense vector index coupled with a seq2seq model to generate disambiguated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms tailor-made approaches on fact checking, open-domain question answering and dialog by generating disambiguated text. |
Goodtriever: Adaptive Toxicity Mitigation with Retrieval-augmented Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for mitigating toxicity require drastic modifications to model parameters or the use of computationally intensive auxiliary models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that matches current state-of-the-art toxicity mitigation while achieving 43% relative latency reduction during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 43% latency reduction during inference and is more computationally efficient. |
Domain-matched Pre-training Tasks for Dense Retrieval (2022.findings-naacl)
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Barlas Oguz, Kushal Lakhotia, Anchit Gupta, Patrick Lewis, Vladimir Karpukhin, Aleksandra Piktus, Xilun Chen, Sebastian Riedel, Scott Yih, Sonal Gupta, Yashar Mehdad
| 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. |
Question and Answer Test-Train Overlap in Open-Domain Question Answering Datasets (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study examines the ability of Open-Domain Question Answering models to produce answers to factoid questions . a large number of models have been used to study the performance of open-domain QA datasets . |
| Approach: | They evaluate open-domain question answering models to see what they can generalize . they find that all models perform substantially worse on questions that cannot be memorized from train sets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a closed-book QA model on the open-domain datasets. |
Unsupervised Question Decomposition for Question Answering (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing QA systems struggle to answer complex questions because information is scattered in different places. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised algorithm that decomposes hard questions into simpler sub-questions . they propose an algorithm that can be used to generate a final answer from millions of questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm decomposes hard questions into simpler sub-questions that existing QA systems can answer. |
From One to Many: Expanding the Scope of Toxicity Mitigation in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | toxicity mitigation in language models has been focused on single-language settings . however, widespread adoption of LLMs has introduced a range of unknown -harms . |
| Approach: | They employ translated data to evaluate and enhance mitigation techniques in the absence of sufficient annotated datasets across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach compares translation quality and retrieval-augmented mitigation techniques under static and continual toxicity mitigation scenarios. |
Challenges in Generalization in Open Domain Question Answering (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on Open Domain Question Answering has shown that there is a large discrepancy in model performance between novel test questions and those that largely overlap with training questions. |
| Approach: | They introduce and annotate questions according to three categories that measure training set overlap, compositional generalization, and novel-entity generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform better on established datasets and lower on comp-gen/novel-entity questions than on the full test set. |