Papers by Wen-tau Yih
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Using synthetic data, existing models struggle with questions that require inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset and two new neural models that exploit alternative mechanisms for state prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves accuracy by 19% over previous models. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for entity linking are limited to entity disambiguation and require mention boundaries to be given in the input. |
| Approach: | They propose a fast end-to-end entity linking model that uses a biencoder to jointly detect mentions and link in one pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state of the art on WebQSP and GraphQuestions with extended annotations that cover multiple entities per question. |
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| Challenge: | Existing learning approaches for parsing from denotations (SpFD) do not provide access to correct representations, so there are two steps for every training example. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for parsing from denotations that generalizes three different learning algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous work by 5.0% absolute on exact match accuracy on a question answering dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models can generate factually inaccurate content, a problem known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates a working memory that receives feedback from external resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on four fact-seeking datasets and increases the factuality metric by 2 to 6 points absolute. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-training and fine-tuning methods have drastically reshaped the landscape of natural language processing research. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight BERT model that introduces sparse block structures into the attention matrix to reduce memory consumption and training/inference time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model uses 18.7-36.1% less memory and 12.0-25.1% more time to learn compared to an advanced BERT-based model, RoBERTa. |
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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 work on learning contextual representations has used LSTM-based biLMs, but there is no reason to believe this is effective. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pre-trained bidirectional language models to learn contextual word embeddings for four NLP tasks and to use them to study the effects of architecture on endtask accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform word embeddings for four NLP tasks and all learn representations that vary with network depth. |
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models for Open-domain Question Answering (QA) achieve high recall amongst top few predictions, but low overall accuracy, motivating the need for answer re-ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to make answer re-ranking successful for span-extraction tasks even beyond large pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 45.5% Exact Match accuracy on Natural Questions and 61.7% on TriviaQA. |
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| Challenge: | Conventional supervised training is a pervasive paradigm for NLP problems . however, examples of the same problem may vary widely . a few-shot meta-learning scenario is used to learn multiple models . |
| Approach: | They propose a learning protocol that treats each example as a unique pseudo-task . they use a few-shot meta-learning scenario to reduce the original learning problem to a single example . |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning protocol achieves 1.1%–5.4% accuracy gains over non-meta-learning counterparts on a WikiSQL dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) often struggle to pay enough attention to the input context, and generate texts that are unfaithful or contain hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware decoding technique that amplifies the difference between the output probabilities when a model is used with and without context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves faithfulness of different LM families including OPT, GPT, LLaMA, and FLAN-T5 for summarization tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the burgeoning of pretrained language models (LMs) for text-based natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained language model that jointly learns representations for NL sentences and (semi-)structured tables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs best on the weakly-supervised semantic parsing benchmark WikiTableQuestions while performing competitively on the text-to-SQL dataset Spider. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Empirically, EAR improves top-5/20 accuracy by 3-8 and 5-10 points . dense retrievers are limited by their inability to perform semantic matching for relevant passages that have low lexical overlap with the query. |
| Approach: | They propose a query expansion and reranking approach for improving passage retrieval with the application to open-domain question answering. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, EAR improves top-5/20 accuracy by 3-8 and 5-10 points when compared to a vanilla query expansion model and a dense retrieval model. |
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| Challenge: | Existing literature on knowledge extraction for question answering questions whether it is still relevant for question answerrs. |
| Approach: | They extend an existing benchmark with knowledge extraction annotations and evaluate commercial and open-source LLMs of varying sizes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve high QA accuracy, but can still benefit from knowledge extraction through augmentation with extracted triples and multi-task learning. |
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| Challenge: | Existing re-ranking methods for open-domain question answering are not domain- or task-specific. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple and effective re-ranking method for improving passage retrieval in open-domain question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong supervised models on open-domain questions and triviaQA datasets on top-1000 passages. |
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented language models require access to internal representations to enhance performance. |
| Approach: | They introduce a retrieval-augmented language modeling framework that treats the language model as a black box and augments it with a tuneable retrieval model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on language modeling tasks by 6.3% and 5.1%. |
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| Challenge: | tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of cutting-edge research in open-domain question answering (QA) |
| Approach: | tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of cutting-edge research in open-domain question answering . focus will shift to cutting- edge models proposed for open- domain QA . |
| Outcome: | The tutorial will cover cutting-edge research in open-domain question answering (QA) it will cover two-stage retriever-reader approaches, dense retriever and end-to-end training, and retriever free methods . |
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to multi-hop question answering rely on in-context learning . however, these models contain billions of parameters making them inefficient at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for improving smaller language models with less than 10 human-annotated QA pairs by synthesizing millions of multi-hop questions and claims to fine tune language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance on multi-hop question answering and fact verification benchmarks while being almost one-third the size in parameter count. |
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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 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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for procedural text comprehension still struggle with this task . evaluative work shows that consistent predictions from multiple entities can improve performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages label consistency during training to improve prediction performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves prediction performance over previous state-of-the-art systems on a standard benchmark dataset for procedural text, ProPara. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning semantic parsers are expensive and tedious . despite the widespread applications, bootstrapping and fine-tuning is tedious a task . |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative method for learning semantic parsers directly from users . they propose an annotation-efficient imitation learning algorithm that iteratively collects new datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is cost-effective and shows promising performance on the text-to-SQL problem. |
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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: | a new method for embedding text is developed for tasks that require specialized encoders . INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddables tailored to different tasks and domains based on instruction finetuning . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions . they first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on 70 embedding evaluation tasks with fewer parameters than the previous best model. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve factuality of large language models (LLMs) rely on human-engineered instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that trains the model with distractor-aware QA pairs mixing gold evidence with subtle distractor passages and instills reasoning-centric habits that make the LLM plan, rationalize, and synthesize without extensive human engineered instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art solutions across 12 open-book RAG QA benchmarks and is being deployed in production. |
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| Challenge: | a dataset for Question Answering in Context contains 14K information-seeking QA dialogs . questions are often more open-ended, unanswerable, or only meaningful within the dialog context . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for Question Answering in Context that contains 14K dialogs . they use a student to ask questions about a Wikipedia section and a teacher to answer them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset underperforms humans in a number of reference models . the dataset contains 14K information-seeking dialogs over sections from Wikipedia . |
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| Challenge: | Large language models store factual knowledge in parameters, but it can become outdated as the work evolves . pre-instruction-tuning improves ability of LLMs to absorb knowledge from new documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that instruction-tunes on questions prior to training on documents . they propose to use QA pairs to update factual knowledge of large language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms instruction-tuning on documents by 17.8%. |
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems treat retrieval and generation as separate processes, requiring explicit textual queries to connect them. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-free RAG system that integrates retrieval and generation into a unified model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can achieve 3.6-11.5 accuracy improvements on unseen tasks . it allows models to express their information needs without human-specified queries . |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that inserting an intermediate pre-training stage improves performance of masked language models. |
| Approach: | They propose methods to automate the discovery of optimal masking policies via direct supervision or meta-learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the heuristic of masking named entities on TriviaQA and can be generalizable beyond that task. |
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| Challenge: | Existing captioning models ignore existing alt-text metadata and lack transparency if training data is unknown. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to edit and re-align alt-texts associated with images using human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves image captions and improves text-to-image generation and zero-shot image classification tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown impressive progress in comprehending procedural text, but their predictions can be inconsistent or highly improbable. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate global constraints and bias reading with corpora-based preferences to improve the predicted effects of actions in a paragraph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms earlier models on a benchmark dataset for procedural text comprehension (+8% relative gain) it avoids nonsensical predictions that earlier models make, and it is more robust than previous models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on interactive semantic parsing relies on human annotations to train a model . prior work relied on human-annotated feedback data, which is prohibitively expensive and not scalable . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of simulating NL feedback for interactive semantic parsing . they propose evaluators to assess the quality of the simulated feedback . |
| Outcome: | The proposed simulator can generate high-quality NL feedback to boost the error correction ability of a specific parser. |
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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. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing technologies are not well-suited for use in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based intelligent agent that generates a clarification question in natural language . they propose 'interactive semantic parsing' with a human user in the loop . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves both parsing accuracy and user confidence . it is demonstrated on two text-to-SQL datasets with different state-of-the-art parsers . |
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| Challenge: | Existing QA models are not robust to variations in question constraints, but can be made more robust by tuning on clusters of related questions. |
| Approach: | They introduce RoMQA, the first benchmark for robust, multi-evidence, multianswer question answering (QA) RoMQ contains clusters of related questions that are derived from the Wikidata knowledge graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is the first benchmark for robust, multi-evidence, multianswer question answering (QA) compared to prior QA datasets, it has more human-written questions that require reasoning over more evidence text and have, on average, many more correct answers. |
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| Challenge: | XPAD is a new model that predicts actions' effects and their dependencies based on background knowledge . previous work on extracting sequences of actions from text has focused on identifying why they are the way they are . |
| Approach: | They propose a new model that biases effect predictions towards those that explain more of the actions in the paragraph and are more plausible with respect to background knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing systems on explaining actions by predicting dependencies while maintaining the performance on the original task in ProPara. |
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| Challenge: | On any given day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are created on the Internet, a figure that is only expected to increase in the coming years. |
| Approach: | They propose a general-purpose misinformation model that jointly models multiple domains of misinformation with a single, unified setup. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is useful for few-shot learning of unseen misinformation tasks/datasets and generalizability to unseense events. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are expensive to train, deploy, and maintain, both financially and in terms of environmental impact. |
| Approach: | They present a reality check on large language models and compare their predictions to retrieval-augmented language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models fare better on question answering tasks and have become the foundation of impressive demos like Chat-GPT. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that adversarial data collection (ADC) models perform better on other adversarially collected data but are liable under plausible domain shifts. |
| Approach: | They conduct a large-scale controlled study on question answering by assigning workers at random to compose questions either adversarially (with a model in the loop) or in the standard fashion (without a modeling). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on other adversarial datasets but worse on diverse collection of out-of-domain evaluation sets. |
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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. |