Daily Papers

In this work, we aim to connect two research areas: instruction models and retrieval-based models. While instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at extracting information from text, they are not suitable for semantic retrieval. Similarity search over embedding vectors allows to index and query vectors, but the similarity reflected in the embedding is sub-optimal for many use cases. We identify the task of retrieving sentences based on abstract descriptions of their content. We demonstrate the inadequacy of current text embeddings and propose an alternative model that significantly improves when used in standard nearest neighbor search. The model is trained using positive and negative pairs sourced through prompting an a large language model (LLM). While it is easy to source the training material from an LLM, the retrieval task cannot be performed by the LLM directly. This demonstrates that data from LLMs can be used not only for distilling more efficient specialized models than the original LLM, but also for creating new capabilities not immediately possible using the original model.

Recent Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating extensive knowledge retrieved from external sources. However, such approach encounters some challenges: Firstly, the original queries may not be suitable for precise retrieval, resulting in erroneous contextual knowledge; Secondly, the language model can easily generate inconsistent answer with external references due to their knowledge boundary limitation. To address these issues, we propose the chain-of-verification (CoV-RAG) to enhance the external retrieval correctness and internal generation consistency. Specifically, we integrate the verification module into the RAG, engaging in scoring, judgment, and rewriting. To correct external retrieval errors, CoV-RAG retrieves new knowledge using a revised query. To correct internal generation errors, we unify QA and verification tasks with a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning during training. Our comprehensive experiments across various LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability compared with other strong baselines. Especially, our CoV-RAG can significantly surpass the state-of-the-art baselines using different LLM backbones.

We study retrieving a set of documents that covers various perspectives on a complex and contentious question (e.g., will ChatGPT do more harm than good?). We curate a Benchmark for Retrieval Diversity for Subjective questions (BERDS), where each example consists of a question and diverse perspectives associated with the question, sourced from survey questions and debate websites. On this data, retrievers paired with a corpus are evaluated to surface a document set that contains diverse perspectives. Our framing diverges from most retrieval tasks in that document relevancy cannot be decided by simple string matches to references. Instead, we build a language model based automatic evaluator that decides whether each retrieved document contains a perspective. This allows us to evaluate the performance of three different types of corpus (Wikipedia, web snapshot, and corpus constructed on the fly with retrieved pages from the search engine) paired with retrievers. Retrieving diverse documents remains challenging, with the outputs from existing retrievers covering all perspectives on only 33.74% of the examples. We further study the impact of query expansion and diversity-focused reranking approaches and analyze retriever sycophancy. Together, we lay the foundation for future studies in retrieval diversity handling complex queries.

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) has been significantly advanced from the scaling of recent Large Language Models (LLMs). The key idea is to convert the visual information into the language feature space so that the capacity of LLMs can be fully exploited. Existing VideoQA methods typically take two paradigms: (1) learning cross-modal alignment, and (2) using an off-the-shelf captioning model to describe the visual data. However, the first design needs costly training on many extra multi-modal data, whilst the second is further limited by limited domain generalization. To address these limitations, a simple yet effective Retrieving-to-Answer (R2A) framework is proposed.Given an input video, R2A first retrieves a set of semantically similar texts from a generic text corpus using a pre-trained multi-modal model (e.g., CLIP). With both the question and the retrieved texts, a LLM (e.g., DeBERTa) can be directly used to yield a desired answer. Without the need for cross-modal fine-tuning, R2A allows for all the key components (e.g., LLM, retrieval model, and text corpus) to plug-and-play. Extensive experiments on several VideoQA benchmarks show that despite with 1.3B parameters and no fine-tuning, our R2A can outperform the 61 times larger Flamingo-80B model even additionally trained on nearly 2.1B multi-modal data.

In this survey, we review methods that retrieve multimodal knowledge to assist and augment generative models. This group of works focuses on retrieving grounding contexts from external sources, including images, codes, tables, graphs, and audio. As multimodal learning and generative AI have become more and more impactful, such retrieval augmentation offers a promising solution to important concerns such as factuality, reasoning, interpretability, and robustness. We provide an in-depth review of retrieval-augmented generation in different modalities and discuss potential future directions. As this is an emerging field, we continue to add new papers and methods.

Many online content portals allow users to ask questions to supplement their understanding (e.g., of lectures). While information retrieval (IR) systems may provide answers for such user queries, they do not directly assist content creators -- such as lecturers who want to improve their content -- identify segments that _caused_ a user to ask those questions. We introduce the task of backtracing, in which systems retrieve the text segment that most likely caused a user query. We formalize three real-world domains for which backtracing is important in improving content delivery and communication: understanding the cause of (a) student confusion in the Lecture domain, (b) reader curiosity in the News Article domain, and (c) user emotion in the Conversation domain. We evaluate the zero-shot performance of popular information retrieval methods and language modeling methods, including bi-encoder, re-ranking and likelihood-based methods and ChatGPT. While traditional IR systems retrieve semantically relevant information (e.g., details on "projection matrices" for a query "does projecting multiple times still lead to the same point?"), they often miss the causally relevant context (e.g., the lecturer states "projecting twice gets me the same answer as one projection"). Our results show that there is room for improvement on backtracing and it requires new retrieval approaches. We hope our benchmark serves to improve future retrieval systems for backtracing, spawning systems that refine content generation and identify linguistic triggers influencing user queries. Our code and data are open-sourced: https://github.com/rosewang2008/backtracing.

Image Retrieval aims to retrieve corresponding images based on a given query. In application scenarios, users intend to express their retrieval intent through various query styles. However, current retrieval tasks predominantly focus on text-query retrieval exploration, leading to limited retrieval query options and potential ambiguity or bias in user intention. In this paper, we propose the Style-Diversified Query-Based Image Retrieval task, which enables retrieval based on various query styles. To facilitate the novel setting, we propose the first Diverse-Style Retrieval dataset, encompassing diverse query styles including text, sketch, low-resolution, and art. We also propose a light-weighted style-diversified retrieval framework. For various query style inputs, we apply the Gram Matrix to extract the query's textural features and cluster them into a style space with style-specific bases. Then we employ the style-init prompt tuning module to enable the visual encoder to comprehend the texture and style information of the query. Experiments demonstrate that our model, employing the style-init prompt tuning strategy, outperforms existing retrieval models on the style-diversified retrieval task. Moreover, style-diversified queries~(sketch+text, art+text, etc) can be simultaneously retrieved in our model. The auxiliary information from other queries enhances the retrieval performance within the respective query.

Today's robot policies exhibit subpar performance when faced with the challenge of generalizing to novel environments. Human corrective feedback is a crucial form of guidance to enable such generalization. However, adapting to and learning from online human corrections is a non-trivial endeavor: not only do robots need to remember human feedback over time to retrieve the right information in new settings and reduce the intervention rate, but also they would need to be able to respond to feedback that can be arbitrary corrections about high-level human preferences to low-level adjustments to skill parameters. In this work, we present Distillation and Retrieval of Online Corrections (DROC), a large language model (LLM)-based system that can respond to arbitrary forms of language feedback, distill generalizable knowledge from corrections, and retrieve relevant past experiences based on textual and visual similarity for improving performance in novel settings. DROC is able to respond to a sequence of online language corrections that address failures in both high-level task plans and low-level skill primitives. We demonstrate that DROC effectively distills the relevant information from the sequence of online corrections in a knowledge base and retrieves that knowledge in settings with new task or object instances. DROC outperforms other techniques that directly generate robot code via LLMs by using only half of the total number of corrections needed in the first round and requires little to no corrections after two iterations. We show further results, videos, prompts and code on https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/droc .

Despite recent advances in large language models, building dependable and deployable NLP models typically requires abundant, high-quality training data. However, task-specific data is not available for many use cases, and manually curating task-specific data is labor-intensive. Recent work has studied prompt-driven synthetic data generation using large language models, but these generated datasets tend to lack complexity and diversity. To address these limitations, we introduce a method, DataTune, to make better use of existing, publicly available datasets to improve automatic dataset generation. DataTune performs dataset transformation, enabling the repurposing of publicly available datasets into a format that is directly aligned with the specific requirements of target tasks. On a diverse set of language-based tasks from the BIG-Bench benchmark, we find that finetuning language models via DataTune improves over a few-shot prompting baseline by 49\% and improves over existing methods that use synthetic or retrieved training data by 34\%. We find that dataset transformation significantly increases the diversity and difficulty of generated data on many tasks. We integrate DataTune into an open-source repository to make this method accessible to the community: https://github.com/neulab/prompt2model.

We introduce the StatCan Dialogue Dataset consisting of 19,379 conversation turns between agents working at Statistics Canada and online users looking for published data tables. The conversations stem from genuine intents, are held in English or French, and lead to agents retrieving one of over 5000 complex data tables. Based on this dataset, we propose two tasks: (1) automatic retrieval of relevant tables based on a on-going conversation, and (2) automatic generation of appropriate agent responses at each turn. We investigate the difficulty of each task by establishing strong baselines. Our experiments on a temporal data split reveal that all models struggle to generalize to future conversations, as we observe a significant drop in performance across both tasks when we move from the validation to the test set. In addition, we find that response generation models struggle to decide when to return a table. Considering that the tasks pose significant challenges to existing models, we encourage the community to develop models for our task, which can be directly used to help knowledge workers find relevant tables for live chat users.

Publicly available source-code libraries are continuously growing and changing. This makes it impossible for models of code to keep current with all available APIs by simply training these models on existing code repositories. Thus, existing models inherently cannot generalize to using unseen functions and libraries, because these would never appear in the training data. In contrast, when human programmers use functions and libraries for the first time, they frequently refer to textual resources such as code manuals and documentation, to explore and understand the available functionality. Inspired by this observation, we introduce DocPrompting: a natural-language-to-code generation approach that explicitly leverages documentation by (1) retrieving the relevant documentation pieces given an NL intent, and (2) generating code based on the NL intent and the retrieved documentation. DocPrompting is general: it can be applied to any programming language and is agnostic to the underlying neural model. We demonstrate that DocPrompting consistently improves NL-to-code models: DocPrompting improves strong base models such as CodeT5 by 2.85% in pass@1 (52% relative gain) and 4.39% in pass@10 (30% relative gain) in execution-based evaluation on the popular Python CoNaLa benchmark; on a new Bash dataset tldr, DocPrompting improves CodeT5 and GPT-Neo1.3B by up to absolute 6.9% exact match.

We enhance auto-regressive language models by conditioning on document chunks retrieved from a large corpus, based on local similarity with preceding tokens. With a 2 trillion token database, our Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) obtains comparable performance to GPT-3 and Jurassic-1 on the Pile, despite using 25times fewer parameters. After fine-tuning, RETRO performance translates to downstream knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering. RETRO combines a frozen Bert retriever, a differentiable encoder and a chunked cross-attention mechanism to predict tokens based on an order of magnitude more data than what is typically consumed during training. We typically train RETRO from scratch, yet can also rapidly RETROfit pre-trained transformers with retrieval and still achieve good performance. Our work opens up new avenues for improving language models through explicit memory at unprecedented scale.

Large language models (LLMs) are often augmented with tools to solve complex tasks. By generating code snippets and executing them through task-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they can offload certain functions to dedicated external modules, such as image encoding and performing calculations. However, most existing approaches to augment LLMs with tools are constrained by general-purpose APIs and lack the flexibility for tailoring them to specific tasks. In this work, we present CRAFT, a general tool creation and retrieval framework for LLMs. It creates toolsets specifically curated for the tasks and equips LLMs with a component that retrieves tools from these sets to enhance their capability to solve complex tasks. For each task, we collect specific code solutions by prompting GPT-4 to solve the training examples. Following a validation step ensuring the correctness, these solutions are abstracted into code snippets to enhance reusability, and deduplicated for higher quality. At inference time, the language model retrieves snippets from the toolsets and then executes them or generates the output conditioning on the retrieved snippets. Our method is designed to be flexible and offers a plug-and-play approach to adapt off-the-shelf LLMs to unseen domains and modalities, without any finetuning. Experiments on vision-language, tabular processing, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that our approach achieves substantial improvements compared to strong baselines. In addition, our in-depth analysis reveals that: (1) consistent performance improvement can be achieved by scaling up the number of tools and the capability of the backbone models; (2) each component of our approach contributes to the performance gains; (3) the created tools are well-structured and reliable with low complexity and atomicity. The code is available at https://github.com/lifan-yuan/CRAFT.

Image captioning and cross-modal retrieval are examples of tasks that involve the joint analysis of visual and linguistic information. In connection to remote sensing imagery, these tasks can help non-expert users in extracting relevant Earth observation information for a variety of applications. Still, despite some previous efforts, the development and application of vision and language models to the remote sensing domain have been hindered by the relatively small size of the available datasets and models used in previous studies. In this work, we propose RS-CapRet, a Vision and Language method for remote sensing tasks, in particular image captioning and text-image retrieval. We specifically propose to use a highly capable large decoder language model together with image encoders adapted to remote sensing imagery through contrastive language-image pre-training. To bridge together the image encoder and language decoder, we propose training simple linear layers with examples from combining different remote sensing image captioning datasets, keeping the other parameters frozen. RS-CapRet can then generate descriptions for remote sensing images and retrieve images from textual descriptions, achieving SOTA or competitive performance with existing methods. Qualitative results illustrate that RS-CapRet can effectively leverage the pre-trained large language model to describe remote sensing images, retrieve them based on different types of queries, and also show the ability to process interleaved sequences of images and text in a dialogue manner.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance on challenging benchmarks that are often structured as multiple-choice question-answering (QA) tasks. Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhances reasoning in LLMs but provides only vague and generic guidance ("think step by step"). This paper introduces ARR, an intuitive and effective zero-shot prompting method that explicitly incorporates three key steps in QA solving: analyzing the intent of the question, retrieving relevant information, and reasoning step by step. Comprehensive experiments across diverse and challenging QA tasks demonstrate that ARR consistently improves the Baseline (without ARR prompting) and outperforms CoT. Ablation and case studies further validate the positive contributions of each component: analyzing, retrieving, and reasoning. Notably, intent analysis plays a vital role in ARR. Additionally, extensive evaluations across various model sizes, LLM series, and generation settings solidify the effectiveness, robustness, and generalizability of ARR.

We propose a method to allow precise and extremely fast mesh extraction from 3D Gaussian Splatting. Gaussian Splatting has recently become very popular as it yields realistic rendering while being significantly faster to train than NeRFs. It is however challenging to extract a mesh from the millions of tiny 3D gaussians as these gaussians tend to be unorganized after optimization and no method has been proposed so far. Our first key contribution is a regularization term that encourages the gaussians to align well with the surface of the scene. We then introduce a method that exploits this alignment to extract a mesh from the Gaussians using Poisson reconstruction, which is fast, scalable, and preserves details, in contrast to the Marching Cubes algorithm usually applied to extract meshes from Neural SDFs. Finally, we introduce an optional refinement strategy that binds gaussians to the surface of the mesh, and jointly optimizes these Gaussians and the mesh through Gaussian splatting rendering. This enables easy editing, sculpting, rigging, animating, compositing and relighting of the Gaussians using traditional softwares by manipulating the mesh instead of the gaussians themselves. Retrieving such an editable mesh for realistic rendering is done within minutes with our method, compared to hours with the state-of-the-art methods on neural SDFs, while providing a better rendering quality.

Integrating information from different reference data sources is a major challenge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems because each knowledge source adopts a unique data structure and follows different conventions. Retrieving from multiple knowledge sources with one fixed strategy usually leads to under-exploitation of information. To mitigate this drawback, inspired by Mix-of-Expert, we introduce Mix-of-Granularity (MoG), a method that dynamically determines the optimal granularity of a knowledge database based on input queries using a router. The router is efficiently trained with a newly proposed loss function employing soft labels. We further extend MoG to Mix-of-Granularity-Graph (MoGG), where reference documents are pre-processed into graphs, enabling the retrieval of relevant information from distantly situated chunks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both MoG and MoGG effectively predict optimal granularity levels, significantly enhancing the performance of the RAG system in downstream tasks. The code of both MoG and MoGG will be made public.

Retrieving proper domain knowledge from an external database lies at the heart of end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems to generate informative responses. Most existing systems blend knowledge retrieval with response generation and optimize them with direct supervision from reference responses, leading to suboptimal retrieval performance when the knowledge base becomes large-scale. To address this, we propose to decouple knowledge retrieval from response generation and introduce a multi-grained knowledge retriever (MAKER) that includes an entity selector to search for relevant entities and an attribute selector to filter out irrelevant attributes. To train the retriever, we propose a novel distillation objective that derives supervision signals from the response generator. Experiments conducted on three standard benchmarks with both small and large-scale knowledge bases demonstrate that our retriever performs knowledge retrieval more effectively than existing methods. Our code has been made publicly available.https://github.com/18907305772/MAKER

Retrieving images from the same location as a given query is an important component of multiple computer vision tasks, like Visual Place Recognition, Landmark Retrieval, Visual Localization, 3D reconstruction, and SLAM. However, existing solutions are built to specifically work for one of these tasks, and are known to fail when the requirements slightly change or when they meet out-of-distribution data. In this paper we combine a variety of existing methods, training techniques, and datasets to train a retrieval model, called MegaLoc, that is performant on multiple tasks. We find that MegaLoc (1) achieves state of the art on a large number of Visual Place Recognition datasets, (2) impressive results on common Landmark Retrieval datasets, and (3) sets a new state of the art for Visual Localization on the LaMAR datasets, where we only changed the retrieval method to the existing localization pipeline. The code for MegaLoc is available at https://github.com/gmberton/MegaLoc

Retrieving documents and prepending them in-context at inference time improves performance of language model (LMs) on a wide range of tasks. However, these documents, often spanning hundreds of words, make inference substantially more expensive. We propose compressing the retrieved documents into textual summaries prior to in-context integration. This not only reduces the computational costs but also relieves the burden of LMs to identify relevant information in long retrieved documents. We present two compressors -- an extractive compressor which selects useful sentences from retrieved documents and an abstractive compressor which generates summaries by synthesizing information from multiple documents. Both compressors are trained to improve LMs' performance on end tasks when the generated summaries are prepended to the LMs' input, while keeping the summary concise.If the retrieved documents are irrelevant to the input or offer no additional information to LM, our compressor can return an empty string, implementing selective augmentation.We evaluate our approach on language modeling task and open domain question answering task. We achieve a compression rate of as low as 6% with minimal loss in performance for both tasks, significantly outperforming the off-the-shelf summarization models. We show that our compressors trained for one LM can transfer to other LMs on the language modeling task and provide summaries largely faithful to the retrieved documents.

Retrieving temporal event sequences from textual descriptions is essential for applications such as analyzing e-commerce behavior, monitoring social media activities, and tracking criminal incidents. In this paper, we introduce TPP-LLM-Embedding, a unified model for efficiently embedding and retrieving event sequences based on natural language descriptions. Built on the TPP-LLM framework, which integrates large language models with temporal point processes, our model encodes both event types and times, generating a sequence-level representation through pooling. Textual descriptions are embedded using the same architecture, ensuring a shared embedding space for both sequences and descriptions. We optimize a contrastive loss based on similarity between these embeddings, bringing matching pairs closer and separating non-matching ones. TPP-LLM-Embedding enables efficient retrieval and demonstrates superior performance compared to baseline models across diverse datasets.

Retrieving external knowledge and prompting large language models with relevant information is an effective paradigm to enhance the performance of question-answering tasks. Previous research typically handles paragraphs from external documents in isolation, resulting in a lack of context and ambiguous references, particularly in multi-document and complex tasks. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new retrieval framework IIER, that leverages Inter-chunk Interactions to Enhance Retrieval. This framework captures the internal connections between document chunks by considering three types of interactions: structural, keyword, and semantic. We then construct a unified Chunk-Interaction Graph to represent all external documents comprehensively. Additionally, we design a graph-based evidence chain retriever that utilizes previous paths and chunk interactions to guide the retrieval process. It identifies multiple seed nodes based on the target question and iteratively searches for relevant chunks to gather supporting evidence. This retrieval process refines the context and reasoning chain, aiding the large language model in reasoning and answer generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IIER outperforms strong baselines across four datasets, highlighting its effectiveness in improving retrieval and reasoning capabilities.

Retrieving and extracting knowledge from extensive research documents and large databases presents significant challenges for researchers, students, and professionals in today's information-rich era. Existing retrieval systems, which rely on general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), often fail to provide accurate responses to domain-specific inquiries. Additionally, the high cost of pretraining or fine-tuning LLMs for specific domains limits their widespread adoption. To address these limitations, we propose a novel methodology that combines the generative capabilities of LLMs with the fast and accurate retrieval capabilities of vector databases. This advanced retrieval system can efficiently handle both tabular and non-tabular data, understand natural language user queries, and retrieve relevant information without fine-tuning. The developed model, Generative Text Retrieval (GTR), is adaptable to both unstructured and structured data with minor refinement. GTR was evaluated on both manually annotated and public datasets, achieving over 90% accuracy and delivering truthful outputs in 87% of cases. Our model achieved state-of-the-art performance with a Rouge-L F1 score of 0.98 on the MSMARCO dataset. The refined model, Generative Tabular Text Retrieval (GTR-T), demonstrated its efficiency in large database querying, achieving an Execution Accuracy (EX) of 0.82 and an Exact-Set-Match (EM) accuracy of 0.60 on the Spider dataset, using an open-source LLM. These efforts leverage Generative AI and In-Context Learning to enhance human-text interaction and make advanced AI capabilities more accessible. By integrating robust retrieval systems with powerful LLMs, our approach aims to democratize access to sophisticated AI tools, improving the efficiency, accuracy, and scalability of AI-driven information retrieval and database querying.

Retrieving adverbs that describe an action in a video poses a crucial step towards fine-grained video understanding. We propose a framework for video-to-adverb retrieval (and vice versa) that aligns video embeddings with their matching compositional adverb-action text embedding in a joint embedding space. The compositional adverb-action text embedding is learned using a residual gating mechanism, along with a novel training objective consisting of triplet losses and a regression target. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on five recent benchmarks for video-adverb retrieval. Furthermore, we introduce dataset splits to benchmark video-adverb retrieval for unseen adverb-action compositions on subsets of the MSR-VTT Adverbs and ActivityNet Adverbs datasets. Our proposed framework outperforms all prior works for the generalisation task of retrieving adverbs from videos for unseen adverb-action compositions. Code and dataset splits are available at https://hummelth.github.io/ReGaDa/.

Bug reports are an essential aspect of software development, and it is crucial to identify and resolve them quickly to ensure the consistent functioning of software systems. Retrieving similar bug reports from an existing database can help reduce the time and effort required to resolve bugs. In this paper, we compared the effectiveness of semantic textual similarity methods for retrieving similar bug reports based on a similarity score. We explored several embedding models such as TF-IDF (Baseline), FastText, Gensim, BERT, and ADA. We used the Software Defects Data containing bug reports for various software projects to evaluate the performance of these models. Our experimental results showed that BERT generally outperformed the rest of the models regarding recall, followed by ADA, Gensim, FastText, and TFIDF. Our study provides insights into the effectiveness of different embedding methods for retrieving similar bug reports and highlights the impact of selecting the appropriate one for this task. Our code is available on GitHub.

Nowadays, data is represented by vectors. Retrieving those vectors, among millions and billions, that are similar to a given query is a ubiquitous problem, known as similarity search, of relevance for a wide range of applications. Graph-based indices are currently the best performing techniques for billion-scale similarity search. However, their random-access memory pattern presents challenges to realize their full potential. In this work, we present new techniques and systems for creating faster and smaller graph-based indices. To this end, we introduce a novel vector compression method, Locally-adaptive Vector Quantization (LVQ), that uses per-vector scaling and scalar quantization to improve search performance with fast similarity computations and a reduced effective bandwidth, while decreasing memory footprint and barely impacting accuracy. LVQ, when combined with a new high-performance computing system for graph-based similarity search, establishes the new state of the art in terms of performance and memory footprint. For billions of vectors, LVQ outcompetes the second-best alternatives: (1) in the low-memory regime, by up to 20.7x in throughput with up to a 3x memory footprint reduction, and (2) in the high-throughput regime by 5.8x with 1.4x less memory.

Retrieving relevant documents from a corpus is typically based on the semantic similarity between the document content and query text. The inclusion of structural relationship between documents can benefit the retrieval mechanism by addressing semantic gaps. However, incorporating these relationships requires tractable mechanisms that balance structure with semantics and take advantage of the prevalent pre-train/fine-tune paradigm. We propose here a holistic approach to learning document representations by integrating intra-document content with inter-document relations. Our deep metric learning solution analyzes the complex neighborhood structure in the relationship network to efficiently sample similar/dissimilar document pairs and defines a novel quintuplet loss function that simultaneously encourages document pairs that are semantically relevant to be closer and structurally unrelated to be far apart in the representation space. Furthermore, the separation margins between the documents are varied flexibly to encode the heterogeneity in relationship strengths. The model is fully fine-tunable and natively supports query projection during inference. We demonstrate that it outperforms competing methods on multiple datasets for document retrieval tasks.

Retrieving clothes which are worn in social media videos (Instagram, TikTok) is the latest frontier of e-fashion, referred to as "video-to-shop" in the computer vision literature. In this paper we present MovingFashion, the first publicly available dataset to cope with this challenge. MovingFashion is composed of 14855 social videos, each one of them associated to e-commerce "shop" images where the corresponding clothing items are clearly portrayed. In addition, we present a network for retrieving the shop images in this scenario, dubbed SEAM Match-RCNN. The model is trained by image-to-video domain adaptation, allowing to use video sequences where only their association with a shop image is given, eliminating the need of millions of annotated bounding boxes. SEAM Match-RCNN builds an embedding, where an attention-based weighted sum of few frames (10) of a social video is enough to individuate the correct product within the first 5 retrieved items in a 14K+ shop element gallery with an accuracy of 80%. This provides the best performance on MovingFashion, comparing exhaustively against the related state-of-the-art approaches and alternative baselines.

Retrieving relevant contexts from a large corpus is a crucial step for tasks such as open-domain question answering and fact checking. Although neural retrieval outperforms traditional methods like tf-idf and BM25, its performance degrades considerably when applied to out-of-domain data. Driven by the question of whether a neural retrieval model can be universal and perform robustly on a wide variety of problems, we propose a multi-task trained model. Our approach not only outperforms previous methods in the few-shot setting, but also rivals specialised neural retrievers, even when in-domain training data is abundant. With the help of our retriever, we improve existing models for downstream tasks and closely match or improve the state of the art on multiple benchmarks.

The vision-based geo-localization technology for UAV, serving as a secondary source of GPS information in addition to the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), can still operate independently in the GPS-denied environment. Recent deep learning based methods attribute this as the task of image matching and retrieval. By retrieving drone-view images in geo-tagged satellite image database, approximate localization information can be obtained. However, due to high costs and privacy concerns, it is usually difficult to obtain large quantities of drone-view images from a continuous area. Existing drone-view datasets are mostly composed of small-scale aerial photography with a strong assumption that there exists a perfect one-to-one aligned reference image for any query, leaving a significant gap from the practical localization scenario. In this work, we construct a large-range contiguous area UAV geo-localization dataset named GTA-UAV, featuring multiple flight altitudes, attitudes, scenes, and targets using modern computer games. Based on this dataset, we introduce a more practical UAV geo-localization task including partial matches of cross-view paired data, and expand the image-level retrieval to the actual localization in terms of distance (meters). For the construction of drone-view and satellite-view pairs, we adopt a weight-based contrastive learning approach, which allows for effective learning while avoiding additional post-processing matching steps. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our data and training method for UAV geo-localization, as well as the generalization capabilities to real-world scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to handle long input sequences due to high memory and runtime costs. Memory-augmented models have emerged as a promising solution to this problem, but current methods are hindered by limited memory capacity and require costly re-training to integrate with a new LLM. In this work, we introduce an associative memory module which can be coupled to any pre-trained (frozen) attention-based LLM without re-training, enabling it to handle arbitrarily long input sequences. Unlike previous methods, our associative memory module consolidates representations of individual tokens into a non-parametric distribution model, dynamically managed by properly balancing the novelty and recency of the incoming data. By retrieving information from this consolidated associative memory, the base LLM can achieve significant (up to 29.7% on Arxiv) perplexity reduction in long-context modeling compared to other baselines evaluated on standard benchmarks. This architecture, which we call CAMELoT (Consolidated Associative Memory Enhanced Long Transformer), demonstrates superior performance even with a tiny context window of 128 tokens, and also enables improved in-context learning with a much larger set of demonstrations.

Despite significant popularity, Large-language Models (LLMs) require explicit, contextual facts to support domain-specific knowledge-intensive tasks in the design process. The applications built using LLMs should hence adopt Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to better suit the design process. In this article, we present a data-driven method to identify explicit facts from patent documents that provide standard descriptions of over 8 million artefacts. In our method, we train roBERTa Transformer-based sequence classification models using our dataset of 44,227 sentences and facts. Upon classifying tokens in a sentence as entities or relationships, our method uses another classifier to identify specific relationship tokens for a given pair of entities so that explicit facts of the form head entity :: relationship :: tail entity are identified. In the benchmark approaches for constructing facts, we use linear classifiers and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) both incorporating BERT Transformer-based token embeddings to predict associations among the entities and relationships. We apply our method to 4,870 fan system related patents and populate a knowledge base of around 3 million facts. Upon retrieving the facts representing generalisable domain knowledge and the knowledge of specific subsystems and issues, we demonstrate how these facts contextualise LLMs for generating text that is more relevant to the design process.

Efficiently retrieving and synthesizing information from large-scale multimodal collections has become a critical challenge. However, existing video retrieval datasets suffer from scope limitations, primarily focusing on matching descriptive but vague queries with small collections of professionally edited, English-centric videos. To address this gap, we introduce MultiVENT 2.0, a large-scale, multilingual event-centric video retrieval benchmark featuring a collection of more than 218,000 news videos and 3,906 queries targeting specific world events. These queries specifically target information found in the visual content, audio, embedded text, and text metadata of the videos, requiring systems leverage all these sources to succeed at the task. Preliminary results show that state-of-the-art vision-language models struggle significantly with this task, and while alternative approaches show promise, they are still insufficient to adequately address this problem. These findings underscore the need for more robust multimodal retrieval systems, as effective video retrieval is a crucial step towards multimodal content understanding and generation tasks.

Attempts to probe the atmospheres of rocky planets around M dwarfs present both promise and peril. While their favorable planet-to-star radius ratios enable searches for even thin secondary atmospheres, their high activity levels and high-energy outputs threaten atmosphere survival. Here, we present the 0.6--2.85\,mum transmission spectrum of the 1.1\,rm R_oplus, sim340\,K rocky planet TRAPPIST-1\,c obtained over two JWST NIRISS/SOSS transit observations. Each of the two spectra displays 100--500\,ppm signatures of stellar contamination. Despite being separated by 367\,days, the retrieved spot and faculae properties are consistent between the two visits, resulting in nearly identical transmission spectra. Jointly retrieving for stellar contamination and a planetary atmosphere reveals that our spectrum can rule out hydrogen-dominated, lesssim300times solar metallicity atmospheres with effective surface pressures down to 10\,mbar at the 3-sigma level. For high-mean molecular weight atmospheres, where O_2 or N_2 is the background gas, our spectrum disfavors partial pressures of more than sim10\,mbar for H_2O, CO, NH_3 and CH_4 at the 2-sigma level. Similarly, under the assumption of a 100\% H_2O, NH_3, CO, or CH_4 atmosphere, our spectrum disfavors thick, >1\,bar atmospheres at the 2-sigma level. These non-detections of spectral features are in line with predictions that even heavier, CO_2-rich, atmospheres would be efficiently lost on TRAPPIST-1\,c given the cumulative high-energy irradiation experienced by the planet. Our results further stress the importance of robustly accounting for stellar contamination when analyzing JWST observations of exo-Earths around M dwarfs, as well as the need for high-fidelity stellar models to search for the potential signals of thin secondary atmospheres.

The canonical approach to video-text retrieval leverages a coarse-grained or fine-grained alignment between visual and textual information. However, retrieving the correct video according to the text query is often challenging as it requires the ability to reason about both high-level (scene) and low-level (object) visual clues and how they relate to the text query. To this end, we propose a Unified Coarse-to-fine Alignment model, dubbed UCoFiA. Specifically, our model captures the cross-modal similarity information at different granularity levels. To alleviate the effect of irrelevant visual clues, we also apply an Interactive Similarity Aggregation module (ISA) to consider the importance of different visual features while aggregating the cross-modal similarity to obtain a similarity score for each granularity. Finally, we apply the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm to normalize the similarities of each level before summing them, alleviating over- and under-representation issues at different levels. By jointly considering the crossmodal similarity of different granularity, UCoFiA allows the effective unification of multi-grained alignments. Empirically, UCoFiA outperforms previous state-of-the-art CLIP-based methods on multiple video-text retrieval benchmarks, achieving 2.4%, 1.4% and 1.3% improvements in text-to-video retrieval R@1 on MSR-VTT, Activity-Net, and DiDeMo, respectively. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ziyang412/UCoFiA.

Many recent efforts augment language models with retrieval, by adding retrieved data to the input context. For this approach to succeed, the retrieved data must be added at both training and test time. Moreover, as input length grows linearly with the size of retrieved data, cost in computation and memory grows quadratically for modern Transformers. To avoid these complications, we simply fine-tune the model on retrieved data at test time, using its standard training setup. We build a large-scale distributed index based on text embeddings of the Pile dataset. For each test input, our system retrieves its neighbors and fine-tunes the model on their text. Surprisingly, retrieving and training on as few as 20 neighbors, each for only one gradient iteration, drastically improves performance across more than 20 language modeling tasks in the Pile. For example, test-time training with nearest neighbors significantly narrows the performance gap between a small GPT-2 and a GPT-Neo model more than 10 times larger. Sufficient index quality and size, however, are necessary. Our work establishes a first baseline of test-time training for language modeling.

Better understanding of Large Language Models' (LLMs) legal analysis abilities can contribute to improving the efficiency of legal services, governing artificial intelligence, and leveraging LLMs to identify inconsistencies in law. This paper explores LLM capabilities in applying tax law. We choose this area of law because it has a structure that allows us to set up automated validation pipelines across thousands of examples, requires logical reasoning and maths skills, and enables us to test LLM capabilities in a manner relevant to real-world economic lives of citizens and companies. Our experiments demonstrate emerging legal understanding capabilities, with improved performance in each subsequent OpenAI model release. We experiment with retrieving and utilising the relevant legal authority to assess the impact of providing additional legal context to LLMs. Few-shot prompting, presenting examples of question-answer pairs, is also found to significantly enhance the performance of the most advanced model, GPT-4. The findings indicate that LLMs, particularly when combined with prompting enhancements and the correct legal texts, can perform at high levels of accuracy but not yet at expert tax lawyer levels. As LLMs continue to advance, their ability to reason about law autonomously could have significant implications for the legal profession and AI governance.

Despite the remarkable ability of large language models (LMs) to comprehend and generate language, they have a tendency to hallucinate and create factually inaccurate output. Augmenting LMs by retrieving information from external knowledge resources is one promising solution. Most existing retrieval augmented LMs employ a retrieve-and-generate setup that only retrieves information once based on the input. This is limiting, however, in more general scenarios involving generation of long texts, where continually gathering information throughout generation is essential. In this work, we provide a generalized view of active retrieval augmented generation, methods that actively decide when and what to retrieve across the course of the generation. We propose Forward-Looking Active REtrieval augmented generation (FLARE), a generic method which iteratively uses a prediction of the upcoming sentence to anticipate future content, which is then utilized as a query to retrieve relevant documents to regenerate the sentence if it contains low-confidence tokens. We test FLARE along with baselines comprehensively over 4 long-form knowledge-intensive generation tasks/datasets. FLARE achieves superior or competitive performance on all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/jzbjyb/FLARE.

Many use cases require retrieving smaller portions of text, and dense vector-based retrieval systems often perform better with shorter text segments, as the semantics are less likely to be "over-compressed" in the embeddings. Consequently, practitioners often split text documents into smaller chunks and encode them separately. However, chunk embeddings created in this way can lose contextual information from surrounding chunks, resulting in suboptimal representations. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called "late chunking," which leverages long context embedding models to first embed all tokens of the long text, with chunking applied after the transformer model and just before mean pooling. The resulting chunk embeddings capture the full contextual information, leading to superior results across various retrieval tasks without the need for additional training. Moreover, our method is generic enough to be applied to any long-context embedding model.

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the accuracy and relevance of responses by generative language models, it falls short in graph-based contexts where both textual and topological information are important. Naive RAG approaches inherently neglect the structural intricacies of textual graphs, resulting in a critical gap in the generation process. To address this challenge, we introduce Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GRAG), which significantly enhances both the retrieval and generation processes by emphasizing the importance of subgraph structures. Unlike RAG approaches that focus solely on text-based entity retrieval, GRAG maintains an acute awareness of graph topology, which is crucial for generating contextually and factually coherent responses. Our GRAG approach consists of four main stages: indexing of k-hop ego-graphs, graph retrieval, soft pruning to mitigate the impact of irrelevant entities, and generation with pruned textual subgraphs. GRAG's core workflow-retrieving textual subgraphs followed by soft pruning-efficiently identifies relevant subgraph structures while avoiding the computational infeasibility typical of exhaustive subgraph searches, which are NP-hard. Moreover, we propose a novel prompting strategy that achieves lossless conversion from textual subgraphs to hierarchical text descriptions. Extensive experiments on graph multi-hop reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that in scenarios requiring multi-hop reasoning on textual graphs, our GRAG approach significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art RAG methods while effectively mitigating hallucinations.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, they tend to generate factually incorrect reasoning steps when the required knowledge is not available or up-to-date in models' parameters. Recent works turn to retrieving external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. Despite being promising, these chain-based methods suffer from: 1) Negative retrieval. Unnecessary or incorrect retrieval may mislead the reasoning; 2) Limited sight. Lacking the ability to look backward or forward, a local error in one step will propagate along the chain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach: Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning (ProbTree). First, LLMs translate a complex question into a query tree, in which each non-root node denotes a sub-question of its parent node. Then, probabilistic reasoning is conducted over the tree, by solving questions from leaf to root considering the confidence of both question decomposing and answering. During reasoning, for leaf nodes, LLMs choose a more confident answer from Closed-book QA that employs parametric knowledge and Open-book QA that employs retrieved external knowledge, thus eliminating the negative retrieval problem. For non-leaf nodes, with the hierarchical structure, LLMs have broader sights and are able to globally reason with the information from child nodes, thus recovering from local errors. The experiments on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting show that our approach outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effect of probabilistic tree-of-thought reasoning.

Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a compelling level of proficiency in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks. This ability to impute unobservable mental states to others is vital to human social cognition and may prove equally important in principal-agent relations between individual humans and Artificial Intelligences (AIs). In this paper, we explore how a mechanism studied in developmental psychology known as Violation of Expectation (VoE) can be implemented to reduce errors in LLM prediction about users by leveraging emergent ToM affordances. And we introduce a metacognitive prompting framework to apply VoE in the context of an AI tutor. By storing and retrieving facts derived in cases where LLM expectation about the user was violated, we find that LLMs are able to learn about users in ways that echo theories of human learning. Finally, we discuss latent hazards and augmentative opportunities associated with modeling user psychology and propose ways to mitigate risk along with possible directions for future inquiry.

This paper introduces the first two pixel retrieval benchmarks. Pixel retrieval is segmented instance retrieval. Like semantic segmentation extends classification to the pixel level, pixel retrieval is an extension of image retrieval and offers information about which pixels are related to the query object. In addition to retrieving images for the given query, it helps users quickly identify the query object in true positive images and exclude false positive images by denoting the correlated pixels. Our user study results show pixel-level annotation can significantly improve the user experience. Compared with semantic and instance segmentation, pixel retrieval requires a fine-grained recognition capability for variable-granularity targets. To this end, we propose pixel retrieval benchmarks named PROxford and PRParis, which are based on the widely used image retrieval datasets, ROxford and RParis. Three professional annotators label 5,942 images with two rounds of double-checking and refinement. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis on the SOTA methods in image search, image matching, detection, segmentation, and dense matching using our pixel retrieval benchmarks. Results show that the pixel retrieval task is challenging to these approaches and distinctive from existing problems, suggesting that further research can advance the content-based pixel-retrieval and thus user search experience. The datasets can be downloaded from https://github.com/anguoyuan/Pixel_retrieval-Segmented_instance_retrieval{this link}.

Fact-checking requires retrieving evidence related to a claim under investigation. The task can be formulated as question generation based on a claim, followed by question answering. However, recent question generation approaches assume that the answer is known and typically contained in a passage given as input, whereas such passages are what is being sought when verifying a claim. In this paper, we present {\it Varifocal}, a method that generates questions based on different focal points within a given claim, i.e.\ different spans of the claim and its metadata, such as its source and date. Our method outperforms previous work on a fact-checking question generation dataset on a wide range of automatic evaluation metrics. These results are corroborated by our manual evaluation, which indicates that our method generates more relevant and informative questions. We further demonstrate the potential of focal points in generating sets of clarification questions for product descriptions.

In this paper, we consider the task of retrieving documents with predefined topics from an unlabeled document dataset using an unsupervised approach. The proposed unsupervised approach requires only a small number of keywords describing the respective topics and no labeled document. Existing approaches either heavily relied on a large amount of additionally encoded world knowledge or on term-document frequencies. Contrariwise, we introduce a method that learns jointly embedded document and word vectors solely from the unlabeled document dataset in order to find documents that are semantically similar to the topics described by the keywords. The proposed method requires almost no text preprocessing but is simultaneously effective at retrieving relevant documents with high probability. When successively retrieving documents on different predefined topics from publicly available and commonly used datasets, we achieved an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve value of 0.95 on one dataset and 0.92 on another. Further, our method can be used for multiclass document classification, without the need to assign labels to the dataset in advance. Compared with an unsupervised classification baseline, we increased F1 scores from 76.6 to 82.7 and from 61.0 to 75.1 on the respective datasets. For easy replication of our approach, we make the developed Lbl2Vec code publicly available as a ready-to-use tool under the 3-Clause BSD license.

Previous works on knowledge-to-text generation take as input a few RDF triples or key-value pairs conveying the knowledge of some entities to generate a natural language description. Existing datasets, such as WIKIBIO, WebNLG, and E2E, basically have a good alignment between an input triple/pair set and its output text. However, in practice, the input knowledge could be more than enough, since the output description may only cover the most significant knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale and challenging dataset to facilitate the study of such a practical scenario in KG-to-text. Our dataset involves retrieving abundant knowledge of various types of main entities from a large knowledge graph (KG), which makes the current graph-to-sequence models severely suffer from the problems of information loss and parameter explosion while generating the descriptions. We address these challenges by proposing a multi-graph structure that is able to represent the original graph information more comprehensively. Furthermore, we also incorporate aggregation methods that learn to extract the rich graph information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model architecture.

We consider retrieving a specific temporal segment, or moment, from a video given a natural language text description. Methods designed to retrieve whole video clips with natural language determine what occurs in a video but not when. To address this issue, we propose the Moment Context Network (MCN) which effectively localizes natural language queries in videos by integrating local and global video features over time. A key obstacle to training our MCN model is that current video datasets do not include pairs of localized video segments and referring expressions, or text descriptions which uniquely identify a corresponding moment. Therefore, we collect the Distinct Describable Moments (DiDeMo) dataset which consists of over 10,000 unedited, personal videos in diverse visual settings with pairs of localized video segments and referring expressions. We demonstrate that MCN outperforms several baseline methods and believe that our initial results together with the release of DiDeMo will inspire further research on localizing video moments with natural language.

Cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) demonstrate promising performance in solving complex math problems with a divide-and-conquer pipeline and the assistance of in-context learning (ICL) examples. However, their potential for improvement is limited by two critical problems within their ICL examples: granularity-mismatch and the ensuing negative-effect noise problem. Specifically, the LLMs are capable of the dividing process yet mostly failed by inaccurate reasoning within a few conquer steps, while the ICL examples retrieved in question-grained sometimes lack relevant steps for a specific challenging reasoning step. Further, this disconnect may hinder the correct reasoning due to its irrelevance. To this end, we focus on improving the reasoning quality within each step and present BoostStep. BoostStep aligns the granularity between the retrieving and reasoning on step grained, and provides highly related ICL examples for each reasoning step with a novel `first-try' strategy. BoostStep provides more relevant examples than the coarse question-grained strategy, enhancing the model reasoning quality within each step steadily. BoostStep is a general and robust reasoning-enhancing method that not only improves standalone reasoning performance but also integrates seamlessly with Monte Carlo Tree Search methods (MCTS) to refine both candidate generation and decision-making. Quantitatively, it improves GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Math-72B by 3.6\% and 2.0\% respectively on various mathematical benchmarks, and 7.5\% gain combined with MCTS.

Generative models are now widely used by graphic designers and artists. Prior works have shown that these models remember and often replicate content from their training data during generation. Hence as their proliferation increases, it has become important to perform a database search to determine whether the properties of the image are attributable to specific training data, every time before a generated image is used for professional purposes. Existing tools for this purpose focus on retrieving images of similar semantic content. Meanwhile, many artists are concerned with style replication in text-to-image models. We present a framework for understanding and extracting style descriptors from images. Our framework comprises a new dataset curated using the insight that style is a subjective property of an image that captures complex yet meaningful interactions of factors including but not limited to colors, textures, shapes, etc. We also propose a method to extract style descriptors that can be used to attribute style of a generated image to the images used in the training dataset of a text-to-image model. We showcase promising results in various style retrieval tasks. We also quantitatively and qualitatively analyze style attribution and matching in the Stable Diffusion model. Code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/learn2phoenix/CSD.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides LLMs with relevant documents. Although previous studies noted that retrieving many documents can degrade performance, they did not isolate how the quantity of documents affects performance while controlling for context length. We evaluate various language models on custom datasets derived from a multi-hop QA task. We keep the context length and position of relevant information constant while varying the number of documents, and find that increasing the document count in RAG settings poses significant challenges for LLMs. Additionally, our results indicate that processing multiple documents is a separate challenge from handling long contexts. We also make the datasets and code available: https://github.com/shaharl6000/MoreDocsSameLen .

Medical information retrieval (MIR) is essential for retrieving relevant medical knowledge from diverse sources, including electronic health records, scientific literature, and medical databases. However, achieving effective zero-shot dense retrieval in the medical domain poses substantial challenges due to the lack of relevance-labeled data. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Self-Learning Hypothetical Document Embeddings (SL-HyDE) to tackle this issue. SL-HyDE leverages large language models (LLMs) as generators to generate hypothetical documents based on a given query. These generated documents encapsulate key medical context, guiding a dense retriever in identifying the most relevant documents. The self-learning framework progressively refines both pseudo-document generation and retrieval, utilizing unlabeled medical corpora without requiring any relevance-labeled data. Additionally, we present the Chinese Medical Information Retrieval Benchmark (CMIRB), a comprehensive evaluation framework grounded in real-world medical scenarios, encompassing five tasks and ten datasets. By benchmarking ten models on CMIRB, we establish a rigorous standard for evaluating medical information retrieval systems. Experimental results demonstrate that SL-HyDE significantly surpasses existing methods in retrieval accuracy while showcasing strong generalization and scalability across various LLM and retriever configurations. CMIRB data and evaluation code are publicly available at: https://github.com/CMIRB-benchmark/CMIRB.

Multilingual semantic search is the task of retrieving relevant contents to a query expressed in different language combinations. This requires a better semantic understanding of the user's intent and its contextual meaning. Multilingual semantic search is less explored and more challenging than its monolingual or bilingual counterparts, due to the lack of multilingual parallel resources for this task and the need to circumvent "language bias". In this work, we propose an alignment approach: MAML-Align, specifically for low-resource scenarios. Our approach leverages meta-distillation learning based on MAML, an optimization-based Model-Agnostic Meta-Learner. MAML-Align distills knowledge from a Teacher meta-transfer model T-MAML, specialized in transferring from monolingual to bilingual semantic search, to a Student model S-MAML, which meta-transfers from bilingual to multilingual semantic search. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to extend meta-distillation to a multilingual search application. Our empirical results show that on top of a strong baseline based on sentence transformers, our meta-distillation approach boosts the gains provided by MAML and significantly outperforms naive fine-tuning methods. Furthermore, multilingual meta-distillation learning improves generalization even to unseen languages.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving relevant code given a natural language query. While related to other information retrieval tasks, it requires bridging the gap between the language used in code (often abbreviated and highly technical) and natural language more suitable to describe vague concepts and ideas. To enable evaluation of progress on code search, we are releasing the CodeSearchNet Corpus and are presenting the CodeSearchNet Challenge, which consists of 99 natural language queries with about 4k expert relevance annotations of likely results from CodeSearchNet Corpus. The corpus contains about 6 million functions from open-source code spanning six programming languages (Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby). The CodeSearchNet Corpus also contains automatically generated query-like natural language for 2 million functions, obtained from mechanically scraping and preprocessing associated function documentation. In this article, we describe the methodology used to obtain the corpus and expert labels, as well as a number of simple baseline solutions for the task. We hope that CodeSearchNet Challenge encourages researchers and practitioners to study this interesting task further and will host a competition and leaderboard to track the progress on the challenge. We are also keen on extending CodeSearchNet Challenge to more queries and programming languages in the future.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) involves retrieving a target image based on a composed query of an image paired with text that specifies modifications or changes to the visual reference. CIR is inherently an instruction-following task, as the model needs to interpret and apply modifications to the image. In practice, due to the scarcity of annotated data in downstream tasks, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR) is desirable. While existing ZS-CIR models based on CLIP have shown promising results, their capability in interpreting and following modification instructions remains limited. Some research attempts to address this by incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these approaches still face challenges in effectively integrating multimodal information and instruction understanding. To tackle above challenges, we propose a novel embedding method utilizing an instruction-tuned Multimodal LLM (MLLM) to generate composed representation, which significantly enhance the instruction following capability for a comprehensive integration between images and instructions. Nevertheless, directly applying MLLMs introduces a new challenge since MLLMs are primarily designed for text generation rather than embedding extraction as required in CIR. To address this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy to efficiently learn a joint multimodal embedding space and further refining the ability to follow modification instructions by tuning the model in a triplet dataset similar to the CIR format. Extensive experiments on four public datasets: FashionIQ, CIRR, GeneCIS, and CIRCO demonstrates the superior performance of our model, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Codes are available at the GitHub repository.

Text Retrieval (TR) involves finding and retrieving text-based content relevant to a user's query from a large repository, with applications in real-world scenarios such as legal document retrieval. While most existing studies focus on English, limited work addresses Japanese contexts. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset specifically designed for Japanese legal contexts and propose a novel two-phase pipeline tailored to this domain. In the first phase, the model learns a broad understanding of global contexts, enhancing its generalization and adaptability to diverse queries. In the second phase, the model is fine-tuned to address complex queries specific to legal scenarios. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our method, which outperforms existing baselines. Furthermore, our pipeline proves effective in English contexts, surpassing comparable baselines on the MS MARCO dataset. We have made our code publicly available on GitHub, and the model checkpoints are accessible via HuggingFace.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a crucial technique for enhancing the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external information. With the advent of LLMs that support increasingly longer context lengths, there is a growing interest in understanding how these models perform in RAG scenarios. Can these new long context models improve RAG performance? This paper presents a comprehensive study of the impact of increased context length on RAG performance across 20 popular open source and commercial LLMs. We ran RAG workflows while varying the total context length from 2,000 to 128,000 tokens (and 2 million tokens when possible) on three domain-specific datasets, and report key insights on the benefits and limitations of long context in RAG applications. Our findings reveal that while retrieving more documents can improve performance, only a handful of the most recent state of the art LLMs can maintain consistent accuracy at long context above 64k tokens. We also identify distinct failure modes in long context scenarios, suggesting areas for future research.

Automated program repair (APR) aims to fix software bugs without human intervention and template-based APR has been widely investigated with promising results. However, it is challenging for template-based APR to select the appropriate donor code, which is an important repair ingredient for generating candidate patches. Inappropriate donor code may cause plausible but incorrect patch generation even with correct fix patterns, limiting the repair performance. In this paper, we aim to revisit template-based APR, and propose GAMMA, to directly leverage large pre-trained language models for donor code generation. Our main insight is that instead of retrieving donor code in the local buggy file, we can directly predict the correct code tokens based on the context code snippets and repair patterns by a cloze task. Specifically, (1) GAMMA revises a variety of fix templates from state-of-the-art template-based APR techniques (i.e., TBar) and transforms them into mask patterns. (2) GAMMA adopts a pre-trained language model to predict the correct code for masked code as a fill-in-the-blank task. The experimental results demonstrate that GAMMA correctly repairs 82 bugs on Defects4J-v1.2, which achieves 20.59\% (14 bugs) and 26.15\% (17 bugs) improvement over the previous state-of-the-art template-based approach TBar and learning-based one Recoder. Furthermore, GAMMA repairs 45 bugs and 22 bugs from the additional Defects4J-v2.0 and QuixBugs, indicating the generalizability of GAMMA in addressing the dataset overfitting issue. We also prove that adopting other pre-trained language models can provide substantial advancement, e.g., CodeBERT-based and ChatGPT-based GAMMA is able to fix 80 and 67 bugs on Defects4J-v1.2, indicating the scalability of GAMMA. Overall, our study highlights the promising future of adopting pre-trained models to generate correct patches on top of fix patterns.

Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. Here we propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify multi-hop reasoning failures through targeted memory injections on LLM attention heads. First, we analyze the per-layer activations of GPT-2 models in response to single and multi-hop prompts. We then propose a mechanism that allows users to inject pertinent prompt-specific information, which we refer to as "memories," at critical LLM locations during inference. By thus enabling the LLM to incorporate additional relevant information during inference, we enhance the quality of multi-hop prompt completions. We show empirically that a simple, efficient, and targeted memory injection into a key attention layer can often increase the probability of the desired next token in multi-hop tasks, by up to 424%.

Knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILTs) benefit from retrieving high-quality relevant contexts from large external knowledge corpora. Learning task-specific retrievers that return relevant contexts at an appropriate level of semantic granularity, such as a document retriever, passage retriever, sentence retriever, and entity retriever, may help to achieve better performance on the end-to-end task. But a task-specific retriever usually has poor generalization ability to new domains and tasks, and it may be costly to deploy a variety of specialised retrievers in practice. We propose a unified generative retriever (UGR) that combines task-specific effectiveness with robust performance over different retrieval tasks in KILTs. To achieve this goal, we make two major contributions: (i) To unify different retrieval tasks into a single generative form, we introduce an n-gram-based identifier for relevant contexts at different levels of granularity in KILTs. And (ii) to address different retrieval tasks with a single model, we employ a prompt learning strategy and investigate three methods to design prompt tokens for each task. In this way, the proposed UGR model can not only share common knowledge across tasks for better generalization, but also perform different retrieval tasks effectively by distinguishing task-specific characteristics. We train UGR on a heterogeneous set of retrieval corpora with well-designed prompts in a supervised and multi-task fashion. Experimental results on the KILT benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of UGR on in-domain datasets, out-of-domain datasets, and unseen tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at retrieving information from lengthy text, but their vision-language counterparts (VLMs) face difficulties with hour-long videos, especially for temporal grounding. Specifically, these VLMs are constrained by frame limitations, often losing essential temporal details needed for accurate event localization in extended video content. We propose ReVisionLLM, a recursive vision-language model designed to locate events in hour-long videos. Inspired by human search strategies, our model initially targets broad segments of interest, progressively revising its focus to pinpoint exact temporal boundaries. Our model can seamlessly handle videos of vastly different lengths, from minutes to hours. We also introduce a hierarchical training strategy that starts with short clips to capture distinct events and progressively extends to longer videos. To our knowledge, ReVisionLLM is the first VLM capable of temporal grounding in hour-long videos, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets by a significant margin (+2.6% [email protected] on MAD). The code is available at https://github.com/Tanveer81/ReVisionLLM.

The field of bioinformatics has seen significant progress, making the cross-modal text-molecule retrieval task increasingly vital. This task focuses on accurately retrieving molecule structures based on textual descriptions, by effectively aligning textual descriptions and molecules to assist researchers in identifying suitable molecular candidates. However, many existing approaches overlook the details inherent in molecule sub-structures. In this work, we introduce the Optimal TRansport-based Multi-grained Alignments model (ORMA), a novel approach that facilitates multi-grained alignments between textual descriptions and molecules. Our model features a text encoder and a molecule encoder. The text encoder processes textual descriptions to generate both token-level and sentence-level representations, while molecules are modeled as hierarchical heterogeneous graphs, encompassing atom, motif, and molecule nodes to extract representations at these three levels. A key innovation in ORMA is the application of Optimal Transport (OT) to align tokens with motifs, creating multi-token representations that integrate multiple token alignments with their corresponding motifs. Additionally, we employ contrastive learning to refine cross-modal alignments at three distinct scales: token-atom, multitoken-motif, and sentence-molecule, ensuring that the similarities between correctly matched text-molecule pairs are maximized while those of unmatched pairs are minimized. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to explore alignments at both the motif and multi-token levels. Experimental results on the ChEBI-20 and PCdes datasets demonstrate that ORMA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient at retrieving single facts from extended contexts, yet they struggle with tasks requiring the simultaneous retrieval of multiple facts, especially during generation. This paper identifies a novel "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where LLMs progressively lose track of critical information throughout the generation process, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate retrieval. To address this challenge, we introduce Find All Crucial Texts (FACT), an iterative retrieval method that refines context through successive rounds of rewriting. This approach enables models to capture essential facts incrementally, which are often overlooked in single-pass retrieval. Experiments demonstrate that FACT substantially enhances multi-fact retrieval performance across various tasks, though improvements are less notable in general-purpose QA scenarios. Our findings shed light on the limitations of LLMs in multi-fact retrieval and underscore the need for more resilient long-context retrieval strategies.

Enabling generative models to decompose visual concepts from a single image is a complex and challenging problem. In this paper, we study a new and challenging task, customized concept decomposition, wherein the objective is to leverage diffusion models to decompose a single image and generate visual concepts from various perspectives. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage framework, CusConcept (short for Customized Visual Concept Decomposition), to extract customized visual concept embedding vectors that can be embedded into prompts for text-to-image generation. In the first stage, CusConcept employs a vocabulary-guided concept decomposition mechanism to build vocabularies along human-specified conceptual axes. The decomposed concepts are obtained by retrieving corresponding vocabularies and learning anchor weights. In the second stage, joint concept refinement is performed to enhance the fidelity and quality of generated images. We further curate an evaluation benchmark for assessing the performance of the open-world concept decomposition task. Our approach can effectively generate high-quality images of the decomposed concepts and produce related lexical predictions as secondary outcomes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CusConcept.

Words have been represented in a high-dimensional vector space that encodes their semantic similarities, enabling downstream applications such as retrieving synonyms, antonyms, and relevant contexts. However, despite recent advances in multilingual language models (LMs), the effectiveness of these models' representations in semantic retrieval contexts has not been comprehensively explored. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the MINERS, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of multilingual LMs in semantic retrieval tasks, including bitext mining and classification via retrieval-augmented contexts. We create a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of LMs in retrieving samples across over 200 diverse languages, including extremely low-resource languages in challenging cross-lingual and code-switching settings. Our results demonstrate that by solely retrieving semantically similar embeddings yields performance competitive with state-of-the-art approaches, without requiring any fine-tuning.

Large language models record impressive performance on many natural language processing tasks. However, their knowledge capacity is limited to the pretraining corpus. Retrieval augmentation offers an effective solution by retrieving context from external knowledge sources to complement the language model. However, existing retrieval augmentation techniques ignore the structural relationships between these documents. Furthermore, retrieval models are not explored much in scientific tasks, especially in regard to the faithfulness of retrieved documents. In this paper, we propose a novel structure-aware retrieval augmented language model that accommodates document structure during retrieval augmentation. We create a heterogeneous document graph capturing multiple types of relationships (e.g., citation, co-authorship, etc.) that connect documents from more than 15 scientific disciplines (e.g., Physics, Medicine, Chemistry, etc.). We train a graph neural network on the curated document graph to act as a structural encoder for the corresponding passages retrieved during the model pretraining. Particularly, along with text embeddings of the retrieved passages, we obtain structural embeddings of the documents (passages) and fuse them together before feeding them to the language model. We evaluate our model extensively on various scientific benchmarks that include science question-answering and scientific document classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that structure-aware retrieval improves retrieving more coherent, faithful and contextually relevant passages, while showing a comparable performance in the overall accuracy.

Cross Attention is a popular method for retrieving information from a set of context tokens for making predictions. At inference time, for each prediction, Cross Attention scans the full set of O(N) tokens. In practice, however, often only a small subset of tokens are required for good performance. Methods such as Perceiver IO are cheap at inference as they distill the information to a smaller-sized set of latent tokens L < N on which cross attention is then applied, resulting in only O(L) complexity. However, in practice, as the number of input tokens and the amount of information to distill increases, the number of latent tokens needed also increases significantly. In this work, we propose Tree Cross Attention (TCA) - a module based on Cross Attention that only retrieves information from a logarithmic O(log(N)) number of tokens for performing inference. TCA organizes the data in a tree structure and performs a tree search at inference time to retrieve the relevant tokens for prediction. Leveraging TCA, we introduce ReTreever, a flexible architecture for token-efficient inference. We show empirically that Tree Cross Attention (TCA) performs comparable to Cross Attention across various classification and uncertainty regression tasks while being significantly more token-efficient. Furthermore, we compare ReTreever against Perceiver IO, showing significant gains while using the same number of tokens for inference.

Supervised visual captioning models typically require a large scale of images or videos paired with descriptions in a specific language (i.e., the vision-caption pairs) for training. However, collecting and labeling large-scale datasets is time-consuming and expensive for many scenarios and languages. Therefore, sufficient labeled pairs are usually not available. To deal with the label shortage problem, we present a simple yet effective zero-shot approach MultiCapCLIP that can generate visual captions for different scenarios and languages without any labeled vision-caption pairs of downstream datasets. In the training stage, MultiCapCLIP only requires text data for input. Then it conducts two main steps: 1) retrieving concept prompts that preserve the corresponding domain knowledge of new scenarios; 2) auto-encoding the prompts to learn writing styles to output captions in a desired language. In the testing stage, MultiCapCLIP instead takes visual data as input directly to retrieve the concept prompts to generate the final visual descriptions. The extensive experiments on image and video captioning across four benchmarks and four languages (i.e., English, Chinese, German, and French) confirm the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with state-of-the-art zero-shot and weakly-supervised methods, our method achieves 4.8% and 21.5% absolute improvements in terms of BLEU@4 and CIDEr metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/yangbang18/MultiCapCLIP.

Although counterfactual reasoning is a fundamental aspect of intelligence, the lack of large-scale counterfactual open-domain question-answering (QA) benchmarks makes it difficult to evaluate and improve models on this ability. To address this void, we introduce the first such dataset, named IfQA, where each question is based on a counterfactual presupposition via an "if" clause. For example, if Los Angeles was on the east coast of the U.S., what would be the time difference between Los Angeles and Paris? Such questions require models to go beyond retrieving direct factual knowledge from the Web: they must identify the right information to retrieve and reason about an imagined situation that may even go against the facts built into their parameters. The IfQA dataset contains over 3,800 questions that were annotated annotated by crowdworkers on relevant Wikipedia passages. Empirical analysis reveals that the IfQA dataset is highly challenging for existing open-domain QA methods, including supervised retrieve-then-read pipeline methods (EM score 36.2), as well as recent few-shot approaches such as chain-of-thought prompting with GPT-3 (EM score 27.4). The unique challenges posed by the IfQA benchmark will push open-domain QA research on both retrieval and counterfactual reasoning fronts.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving a code snippet given a textual description of its functionality. Recent work has been focused on using similarity metrics between neural embeddings of text and code. However, current language models are known to struggle with longer, compositional text, and multi-step reasoning. To overcome this limitation, we propose supplementing the query sentence with a layout of its semantic structure. The semantic layout is used to break down the final reasoning decision into a series of lower-level decisions. We use a Neural Module Network architecture to implement this idea. We compare our model - NS3 (Neuro-Symbolic Semantic Search) - to a number of baselines, including state-of-the-art semantic code retrieval methods, and evaluate on two datasets - CodeSearchNet and Code Search and Question Answering. We demonstrate that our approach results in more precise code retrieval, and we study the effectiveness of our modular design when handling compositional queries.

We consider the task of retrieving audio using free-form natural language queries. To study this problem, which has received limited attention in the existing literature, we introduce challenging new benchmarks for text-based audio retrieval using text annotations sourced from the Audiocaps and Clotho datasets. We then employ these benchmarks to establish baselines for cross-modal audio retrieval, where we demonstrate the benefits of pre-training on diverse audio tasks. We hope that our benchmarks will inspire further research into cross-modal text-based audio retrieval with free-form text queries.

In open-domain dialogue intelligent agents should exhibit the use of knowledge, however there are few convincing demonstrations of this to date. The most popular sequence to sequence models typically "generate and hope" generic utterances that can be memorized in the weights of the model when mapping from input utterance(s) to output, rather than employing recalled knowledge as context. Use of knowledge has so far proved difficult, in part because of the lack of a supervised learning benchmark task which exhibits knowledgeable open dialogue with clear grounding. To that end we collect and release a large dataset with conversations directly grounded with knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia. We then design architectures capable of retrieving knowledge, reading and conditioning on it, and finally generating natural responses. Our best performing dialogue models are able to conduct knowledgeable discussions on open-domain topics as evaluated by automatic metrics and human evaluations, while our new benchmark allows for measuring further improvements in this important research direction.

Despite their remarkable capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often produce responses containing factual inaccuracies due to their sole reliance on the parametric knowledge they encapsulate. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), an ad hoc approach that augments LMs with retrieval of relevant knowledge, decreases such issues. However, indiscriminately retrieving and incorporating a fixed number of retrieved passages, regardless of whether retrieval is necessary, or passages are relevant, diminishes LM versatility or can lead to unhelpful response generation. We introduce a new framework called Self-Reflective Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Self-RAG) that enhances an LM's quality and factuality through retrieval and self-reflection. Our framework trains a single arbitrary LM that adaptively retrieves passages on-demand, and generates and reflects on retrieved passages and its own generations using special tokens, called reflection tokens. Generating reflection tokens makes the LM controllable during the inference phase, enabling it to tailor its behavior to diverse task requirements. Experiments show that Self-RAG (7B and 13B parameters) significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs and retrieval-augmented models on a diverse set of tasks. Specifically, Self-RAG outperforms ChatGPT and retrieval-augmented Llama2-chat on Open-domain QA, reasoning and fact verification tasks, and it shows significant gains in improving factuality and citation accuracy for long-form generations relative to these models.

We introduce Agent K v1.0, an end-to-end autonomous data science agent designed to automate, optimise, and generalise across diverse data science tasks. Fully automated, Agent K v1.0 manages the entire data science life cycle by learning from experience. It leverages a highly flexible structured reasoning framework to enable it to dynamically process memory in a nested structure, effectively learning from accumulated experience stored to handle complex reasoning tasks. It optimises long- and short-term memory by selectively storing and retrieving key information, guiding future decisions based on environmental rewards. This iterative approach allows it to refine decisions without fine-tuning or backpropagation, achieving continuous improvement through experiential learning. We evaluate our agent's apabilities using Kaggle competitions as a case study. Following a fully automated protocol, Agent K v1.0 systematically addresses complex and multimodal data science tasks, employing Bayesian optimisation for hyperparameter tuning and feature engineering. Our new evaluation framework rigorously assesses Agent K v1.0's end-to-end capabilities to generate and send submissions starting from a Kaggle competition URL. Results demonstrate that Agent K v1.0 achieves a 92.5\% success rate across tasks, spanning tabular, computer vision, NLP, and multimodal domains. When benchmarking against 5,856 human Kaggle competitors by calculating Elo-MMR scores for each, Agent K v1.0 ranks in the top 38\%, demonstrating an overall skill level comparable to Expert-level users. Notably, its Elo-MMR score falls between the first and third quartiles of scores achieved by human Grandmasters. Furthermore, our results indicate that Agent K v1.0 has reached a performance level equivalent to Kaggle Grandmaster, with a record of 6 gold, 3 silver, and 7 bronze medals, as defined by Kaggle's progression system.

MLLM agents demonstrate potential for complex embodied tasks by retrieving multimodal task-relevant trajectory data. However, current retrieval methods primarily focus on surface-level similarities of textual or visual cues in trajectories, neglecting their effectiveness for the specific task at hand. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, MLLM as ReTriever (MART), which enhances the performance of embodied agents by utilizing interaction data to fine-tune an MLLM retriever based on preference learning, such that the retriever fully considers the effectiveness of trajectories and prioritize them for unseen tasks. We also introduce Trajectory Abstraction, a mechanism that leverages MLLMs' summarization capabilities to represent trajectories with fewer tokens while preserving key information, enabling agents to better comprehend milestones in the trajectory. Experimental results across various environments demonstrate our method significantly improves task success rates in unseen scenes compared to baseline methods. This work presents a new paradigm for multimodal retrieval in embodied agents, by fine-tuning a general-purpose MLLM as the retriever to assess trajectory effectiveness. All benchmark task sets and simulator code modifications for action and observation spaces will be released.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to learn in-context, allowing them to perform various tasks based on a few input-output examples. However, the effectiveness of in-context learning is heavily reliant on the quality of the selected examples. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to iteratively train dense retrievers that can identify high-quality in-context examples for LLMs. Our framework initially trains a reward model based on LLM feedback to evaluate the quality of candidate examples, followed by knowledge distillation to train a bi-encoder based dense retriever. Our experiments on a suite of 30 tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances in-context learning performance. Furthermore, we show the generalization ability of our framework to unseen tasks during training. An in-depth analysis reveals that our model improves performance by retrieving examples with similar patterns, and the gains are consistent across LLMs of varying sizes.

Large language models (LLMs) have the remarkable ability to solve new tasks with just a few examples, but they need access to the right tools. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this problem by retrieving a list of relevant tools for a given task. However, RAG's tool retrieval step requires all the required information to be explicitly present in the query. This is a limitation, as semantic search, the widely adopted tool retrieval method, can fail when the query is incomplete or lacks context. To address this limitation, we propose Context Tuning for RAG, which employs a smart context retrieval system to fetch relevant information that improves both tool retrieval and plan generation. Our lightweight context retrieval model uses numerical, categorical, and habitual usage signals to retrieve and rank context items. Our empirical results demonstrate that context tuning significantly enhances semantic search, achieving a 3.5-fold and 1.5-fold improvement in Recall@K for context retrieval and tool retrieval tasks respectively, and resulting in an 11.6% increase in LLM-based planner accuracy. Additionally, we show that our proposed lightweight model using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) with LambdaMART outperforms GPT-4 based retrieval. Moreover, we observe context augmentation at plan generation, even after tool retrieval, reduces hallucination.

This paper introduces a tuning-free method for both object insertion and subject-driven generation. The task involves composing an object, given multiple views, into a scene specified by either an image or text. Existing methods struggle to fully meet the task's challenging objectives: (i) seamlessly composing the object into the scene with photorealistic pose and lighting, and (ii) preserving the object's identity. We hypothesize that achieving these goals requires large scale supervision, but manually collecting sufficient data is simply too expensive. The key observation in this paper is that many mass-produced objects recur across multiple images of large unlabeled datasets, in different scenes, poses, and lighting conditions. We use this observation to create massive supervision by retrieving sets of diverse views of the same object. This powerful paired dataset enables us to train a straightforward text-to-image diffusion architecture to map the object and scene descriptions to the composited image. We compare our method, ObjectMate, with state-of-the-art methods for object insertion and subject-driven generation, using a single or multiple references. Empirically, ObjectMate achieves superior identity preservation and more photorealistic composition. Differently from many other multi-reference methods, ObjectMate does not require slow test-time tuning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are discovered to suffer from accurately retrieving key information. To address this, we propose Mask-Enhanced Autoregressive Prediction (MEAP), a simple yet effective training paradigm that seamlessly integrates Masked Language Modeling (MLM) into Next-Token Prediction (NTP) to enhance the latter's in-context retrieval capabilities. Specifically, MEAP first randomly masks a small fraction of input tokens and then directly performs the standard next-token prediction autoregressive using a decoder-only Transformer. MEAP eliminates the need for bidirectional attention or encoder-decoder architectures for MLM, incurring no additional computational overhead during pre-training or inference. Intensive experiments demonstrate that MEAP substantially outperforms NTP on key information retrieval and long-context reasoning tasks, while performing on par or better on commonsense reasoning tasks. The benefits of MEAP also extend to supervised fine-tuning, where it shows remarkable advantages in lost-in-the-middle scenarios, outperforming NTP by 11.77 percentage points. Our analysis indicates that MEAP's effectiveness arises from its ability to promote more distinguishable attention scores by concentrating on a reduced set of non-masked tokens. This mechanism improves the model's focus on task-relevant signals while mitigating the influence of peripheral context. These findings position MEAP as a promising training paradigm for large language models.

Language models of code (LMs) work well when the surrounding code in the vicinity of generation provides sufficient context. This is not true when it becomes necessary to use types or functionality defined in another module or library, especially those not seen during training. LMs suffer from limited awareness of such global context and end up hallucinating, e.g., using types defined in other files incorrectly. Recent work tries to overcome this issue by retrieving global information to augment the local context. However, this bloats the prompt or requires architecture modifications and additional training. Integrated development environments (IDEs) assist developers by bringing the global context at their fingertips using static analysis. We extend this assistance, enjoyed by developers, to the LMs. We propose a notion of monitors that use static analysis in the background to guide the decoding. Unlike a priori retrieval, static analysis is invoked iteratively during the entire decoding process, providing the most relevant suggestions on demand. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposal by monitoring for type-consistent use of identifiers whenever an LM generates code for object dereference. To evaluate our approach, we curate PragmaticCode, a dataset of open-source projects with their development environments. On models of varying parameter scale, we show that monitor-guided decoding consistently improves the ability of an LM to not only generate identifiers that match the ground truth but also improves compilation rates and agreement with ground truth. We find that LMs with fewer parameters, when guided with our monitor, can outperform larger LMs. With monitor-guided decoding, SantaCoder-1.1B achieves better compilation rate and next-identifier match than the much larger text-davinci-003 model. The datasets and code will be released at https://aka.ms/monitors4codegen .

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) augments large language models (LLM) by retrieving relevant knowledge, showing promising potential in mitigating LLM hallucinations and enhancing response quality, thereby facilitating the great adoption of LLMs in practice. However, we find that existing RAG systems are inadequate in answering multi-hop queries, which require retrieving and reasoning over multiple pieces of supporting evidence. Furthermore, to our knowledge, no existing RAG benchmarking dataset focuses on multi-hop queries. In this paper, we develop a novel dataset, MultiHop-RAG, which consists of a knowledge base, a large collection of multi-hop queries, their ground-truth answers, and the associated supporting evidence. We detail the procedure of building the dataset, utilizing an English news article dataset as the underlying RAG knowledge base. We demonstrate the benchmarking utility of MultiHop-RAG in two experiments. The first experiment compares different embedding models for retrieving evidence for multi-hop queries. In the second experiment, we examine the capabilities of various state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4, PaLM, and Llama2-70B, in reasoning and answering multi-hop queries given the evidence. Both experiments reveal that existing RAG methods perform unsatisfactorily in retrieving and answering multi-hop queries. We hope MultiHop-RAG will be a valuable resource for the community in developing effective RAG systems, thereby facilitating greater adoption of LLMs in practice. The MultiHop-RAG and implemented RAG system is publicly available at https://github.com/yixuantt/MultiHop-RAG/.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has demonstrated significant proficiency in conducting question-answering (QA) tasks within a specified corpus. Nonetheless, numerous failure instances of RAG in QA still exist. These failures are not solely attributable to the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs); instead, they predominantly arise from the retrieval of inaccurate information for LLMs due to two limitations: (1) Current RAG methods segment the corpus without considering semantics, making it difficult to find relevant context due to impaired correlation between questions and the segments. (2) There is a trade-off between missing essential context with fewer context retrieved and getting irrelevant context with more context retrieved. In this paper, we introduce a RAG framework (SAGE), to overcome these limitations. First, to address the segmentation issue without considering semantics, we propose to train a semantic segmentation model. This model is trained to segment the corpus into semantically complete chunks. Second, to ensure that only the most relevant chunks are retrieved while the irrelevant ones are ignored, we design a chunk selection algorithm to dynamically select chunks based on the decreasing speed of the relevance score, leading to a more relevant selection. Third, to further ensure the precision of the retrieved chunks, we propose letting LLMs assess whether retrieved chunks are excessive or lacking and then adjust the amount of context accordingly. Experiments show that SAGE outperforms baselines by 61.25% in the quality of QA on average. Moreover, by avoiding retrieving noisy context, SAGE lowers the cost of the tokens consumed in LLM inference and achieves a 49.41% enhancement in cost efficiency on average. Additionally, our work offers valuable insights for boosting RAG.

Embedding models play a crucial role in representing and retrieving information across various NLP applications. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have further enhanced the performance of embedding models. While these models are often benchmarked on general-purpose datasets, real-world applications demand domain-specific evaluation. In this work, we introduce the Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (FinMTEB), a specialized counterpart to MTEB designed for the financial domain. FinMTEB comprises 64 financial domain-specific embedding datasets across 7 tasks that cover diverse textual types in both Chinese and English, such as financial news articles, corporate annual reports, ESG reports, regulatory filings, and earnings call transcripts. We also develop a finance-adapted model, FinPersona-E5, using a persona-based data synthetic method to cover diverse financial embedding tasks for training. Through extensive evaluation of 15 embedding models, including FinPersona-E5, we show three key findings: (1) performance on general-purpose benchmarks shows limited correlation with financial domain tasks; (2) domain-adapted models consistently outperform their general-purpose counterparts; and (3) surprisingly, a simple Bag-of-Words (BoW) approach outperforms sophisticated dense embeddings in financial Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks, underscoring current limitations in dense embedding techniques. Our work establishes a robust evaluation framework for financial NLP applications and provides crucial insights for developing domain-specific embedding models.

Despite the recent progress in long-context language models, it remains elusive how transformer-based models exhibit the capability to retrieve relevant information from arbitrary locations within the long context. This paper aims to address this question. Our systematic investigation across a wide spectrum of models reveals that a special type of attention heads are largely responsible for retrieving information, which we dub retrieval heads. We identify intriguing properties of retrieval heads:(1) universal: all the explored models with long-context capability have a set of retrieval heads; (2) sparse: only a small portion (less than 5\%) of the attention heads are retrieval. (3) intrinsic: retrieval heads already exist in models pretrained with short context. When extending the context length by continual pretraining, it is still the same set of heads that perform information retrieval. (4) dynamically activated: take Llama-2 7B for example, 12 retrieval heads always attend to the required information no matter how the context is changed. The rest of the retrieval heads are activated in different contexts. (5) causal: completely pruning retrieval heads leads to failure in retrieving relevant information and results in hallucination, while pruning random non-retrieval heads does not affect the model's retrieval ability. We further show that retrieval heads strongly influence chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, where the model needs to frequently refer back the question and previously-generated context. Conversely, tasks where the model directly generates the answer using its intrinsic knowledge are less impacted by masking out retrieval heads. These observations collectively explain which internal part of the model seeks information from the input tokens. We believe our insights will foster future research on reducing hallucination, improving reasoning, and compressing the KV cache.

While language models (LMs) have proven remarkably adept at generating code, many programs are challenging for LMs to generate using their parametric knowledge alone. Providing external contexts such as library documentation can facilitate generating accurate and functional code. Despite the success of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in various text-oriented tasks, its potential for improving code generation remains under-explored. In this work, we conduct a systematic, large-scale analysis by asking: in what scenarios can retrieval benefit code generation models? and what challenges remain? We first curate a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, CodeRAG-Bench, encompassing three categories of code generation tasks, including basic programming, open-domain, and repository-level problems. We aggregate documents from five sources for models to retrieve contexts: competition solutions, online tutorials, library documentation, StackOverflow posts, and GitHub repositories. We examine top-performing models on CodeRAG-Bench by providing contexts retrieved from one or multiple sources. While notable gains are made in final code generation by retrieving high-quality contexts across various settings, our analysis reveals room for improvement -- current retrievers still struggle to fetch useful contexts especially with limited lexical overlap, and generators fail to improve with limited context lengths or abilities to integrate additional contexts. We hope CodeRAG-Bench serves as an effective testbed to encourage further development of advanced code-oriented RAG methods.

Interior design allows us to be who we are and live how we want - each design is as unique as our distinct personality. However, it is not trivial for non-professionals to express and materialize this since it requires aligning functional and visual expectations with the constraints of physical space; this renders interior design a luxury. To make it more accessible, we present I-Design, a personalized interior designer that allows users to generate and visualize their design goals through natural language communication. I-Design starts with a team of large language model agents that engage in dialogues and logical reasoning with one another, transforming textual user input into feasible scene graph designs with relative object relationships. Subsequently, an effective placement algorithm determines optimal locations for each object within the scene. The final design is then constructed in 3D by retrieving and integrating assets from an existing object database. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation protocol that utilizes a vision-language model and complements the design pipeline. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that I-Design outperforms existing methods in delivering high-quality 3D design solutions and aligning with abstract concepts that match user input, showcasing its advantages across detailed 3D arrangement and conceptual fidelity.

Solving mechanics problems using numerical methods requires comprehensive intelligent capability of retrieving relevant knowledge and theory, constructing and executing codes, analyzing the results, a task that has thus far mainly been reserved for humans. While emerging AI methods can provide effective approaches to solve end-to-end problems, for instance via the use of deep surrogate models or various data analytics strategies, they often lack physical intuition since knowledge is baked into the parametric complement through training, offering less flexibility when it comes to incorporating mathematical or physical insights. By leveraging diverse capabilities of multiple dynamically interacting large language models (LLMs), we can overcome the limitations of conventional approaches and develop a new class of physics-inspired generative machine learning platform, here referred to as MechAgents. A set of AI agents can solve mechanics tasks, here demonstrated for elasticity problems, via autonomous collaborations. A two-agent team can effectively write, execute and self-correct code, in order to apply finite element methods to solve classical elasticity problems in various flavors (different boundary conditions, domain geometries, meshes, small/finite deformation and linear/hyper-elastic constitutive laws, and others). For more complex tasks, we construct a larger group of agents with enhanced division of labor among planning, formulating, coding, executing and criticizing the process and results. The agents mutually correct each other to improve the overall team-work performance in understanding, formulating and validating the solution. Our framework shows the potential of synergizing the intelligence of language models, the reliability of physics-based modeling, and the dynamic collaborations among diverse agents, opening novel avenues for automation of solving engineering problems.

We present an automated and efficient approach for retrieving high-quality CAD models of objects and their poses in a scene captured by a moving RGB-D camera. We first investigate various objective functions to measure similarity between a candidate CAD object model and the available data, and the best objective function appears to be a "render-and-compare" method comparing depth and mask rendering. We thus introduce a fast-search method that approximates an exhaustive search based on this objective function for simultaneously retrieving the object category, a CAD model, and the pose of an object given an approximate 3D bounding box. This method involves a search tree that organizes the CAD models and object properties including object category and pose for fast retrieval and an algorithm inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search, that efficiently searches this tree. We show that this method retrieves CAD models that fit the real objects very well, with a speed-up factor of 10x to 120x compared to exhaustive search.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in numerous tasks but still heavily rely on knowledge stored in their parameters. Moreover, updating this knowledge incurs high training costs. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods address this issue by integrating external knowledge. The model can answer questions it couldn't previously by retrieving knowledge relevant to the query. This approach improves performance in certain scenarios for specific tasks. However, if irrelevant texts are retrieved, it may impair model performance. In this paper, we propose Retrieval Augmented Iterative Self-Feedback (RA-ISF), a framework that iteratively decomposes tasks and processes them in three submodules to enhance the model's problem-solving capabilities. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing benchmarks, performing well on models like GPT3.5, Llama2, significantly enhancing factual reasoning capabilities and reducing hallucinations.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) provides an effective yet efficient solution for fine-tuning large language models (LLM). The modular and plug-and-play nature of LoRA enables the integration of diverse domain-specific LoRAs to enhance the capabilities of LLMs. Previous research on exploiting multiple LoRAs either focuses on specific isolated downstream tasks or fixes the selection of LoRAs during training. However, in real-world scenarios, LLMs receive diverse prompts covering different tasks, and the pool of candidate LoRAs is often dynamically updated. To bridge this gap, we propose LoraRetriever, a retrieve-then-compose framework that adaptively retrieves and composes multiple LoRAs according to the input prompts. LoraRetriever contains three main components: firstly, identifying and retrieving LoRAs relevant to the given input; secondly, formulating strategies for effectively integrating the retrieved LoRAs; and thirdly, developing efficient batch inference to accommodate heterogeneous requests. Experimental results indicate that LoraRetriever consistently outperforms the baselines, highlighting its practical effectiveness and versatility.

We present SImProv - a scalable image provenance framework to match a query image back to a trusted database of originals and identify possible manipulations on the query. SImProv consists of three stages: a scalable search stage for retrieving top-k most similar images; a re-ranking and near-duplicated detection stage for identifying the original among the candidates; and finally a manipulation detection and visualization stage for localizing regions within the query that may have been manipulated to differ from the original. SImProv is robust to benign image transformations that commonly occur during online redistribution, such as artifacts due to noise and recompression degradation, as well as out-of-place transformations due to image padding, warping, and changes in size and shape. Robustness towards out-of-place transformations is achieved via the end-to-end training of a differentiable warping module within the comparator architecture. We demonstrate effective retrieval and manipulation detection over a dataset of 100 million images.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving relevant documents, but they face scalability issues due to high inference costs and limited context size. Document compression is a practical solution, but current soft compression methods suffer from accuracy losses and require extensive pretraining. In this paper, we introduce PISCO, a novel method that achieves a 16x compression rate with minimal accuracy loss (0-3%) across diverse RAG-based question-answering (QA) tasks. Unlike existing approaches, PISCO requires no pretraining or annotated data, relying solely on sequence-level knowledge distillation from document-based questions. With the ability to fine-tune a 7-10B LLM in 48 hours on a single A100 GPU, PISCO offers a highly efficient and scalable solution. We present comprehensive experiments showing that PISCO outperforms existing compression models by 8% in accuracy.

Although retrieval-augmented generation(RAG) significantly improves generation quality by retrieving external knowledge bases and integrating generated content, it faces computational efficiency bottlenecks, particularly in knowledge retrieval tasks involving hierarchical structures for Tree-RAG. This paper proposes a Tree-RAG acceleration method based on the improved Cuckoo Filter, which optimizes entity localization during the retrieval process to achieve significant performance improvements. Tree-RAG effectively organizes entities through the introduction of a hierarchical tree structure, while the Cuckoo Filter serves as an efficient data structure that supports rapid membership queries and dynamic updates. The experiment results demonstrate that our method is much faster than naive Tree-RAG while maintaining high levels of generative quality. When the number of trees is large, our method is hundreds of times faster than naive Tree-RAG. Our work is available at https://github.com/TUPYP7180/CFT-RAG-2025.

Bearing in mind the limited parametric knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) which supplies them with the relevant external knowledge has served as an approach to mitigate the issue of hallucinations to a certain extent. However, uniformly retrieving supporting context makes response generation source-inefficient, as triggering the retriever is not always necessary, or even inaccurate, when a model gets distracted by noisy retrieved content and produces an unhelpful answer. Motivated by these issues, we introduce Semantic Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Retrieval (SUGAR), where we leverage context-based entropy to actively decide whether to retrieve and to further determine between single-step and multi-step retrieval. Our empirical results show that selective retrieval guided by semantic uncertainty estimation improves the performance across diverse question answering tasks, as well as achieves a more efficient inference.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, yet struggle with hallucination and outdated knowledge when tasked with complex knowledge reasoning, resulting in factually incorrect outputs. Previous studies have attempted to mitigate it by retrieving factual knowledge from large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) to assist LLMs in logical reasoning and prediction of answers. However, this kind of approach often introduces noise and irrelevant data, especially in situations with extensive context from multiple knowledge aspects. In this way, LLM attention can be potentially mislead from question and relevant information. In our study, we introduce an Adaptive Multi-Aspect Retrieval-augmented over KGs (Amar) framework. This method retrieves knowledge including entities, relations, and subgraphs, and converts each piece of retrieved text into prompt embeddings. The Amar framework comprises two key sub-components: 1) a self-alignment module that aligns commonalities among entities, relations, and subgraphs to enhance retrieved text, thereby reducing noise interference; 2) a relevance gating module that employs a soft gate to learn the relevance score between question and multi-aspect retrieved data, to determine which information should be used to enhance LLMs' output, or even filtered altogether. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on two common datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, showing a 1.9\% improvement in accuracy over its best competitor and a 6.6\% improvement in logical form generation over a method that directly uses retrieved text as context prompts. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Amar in improving the reasoning of LLMs.

Effective code retrieval plays a crucial role in advancing code generation, bug fixing, and software maintenance, particularly as software systems increase in complexity. While current code embedding models have demonstrated promise in retrieving code snippets for small-scale, well-defined tasks, they often underperform in more demanding real-world applications such as bug localization within GitHub repositories. We hypothesize that a key issue is their reliance on noisy and inconsistent datasets for training, which impedes their ability to generalize to more complex retrieval scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce CoRNStack, a large-scale, high-quality contrastive training dataset for code that spans multiple programming languages. This dataset is curated using consistency filtering to eliminate noisy positives and is further enriched with mined hard negatives, thereby facilitating more effective learning. We demonstrate that contrastive training of embedding models using CoRNStack leads to state-of-the-art performance across a variety of code retrieval tasks. Furthermore, the dataset can be leveraged for training code reranking models, a largely underexplored area compared to text reranking. Our finetuned code reranking model significantly improves the ranking quality over the retrieved results. Finally, by employing our code retriever and reranker together, we demonstrate significant improvements in function localization for GitHub issues, an important component of real-world software development.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly improved the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. While existing research seeks to enhance RAG performance by retrieving higher-quality documents or designing RAG-specific LLMs, the internal mechanisms within LLMs that contribute to the effectiveness of RAG systems remain underexplored. In this paper, we aim to investigate these internal mechanisms within the popular Mixture-of-Expert (MoE)-based LLMs and demonstrate how to improve RAG by examining expert activations in these LLMs. Our controlled experiments reveal that several core groups of experts are primarily responsible for RAG-related behaviors. The activation of these core experts can signify the model's inclination towards external/internal knowledge and adjust its behavior. For instance, we identify core experts that can (1) indicate the sufficiency of the model's internal knowledge, (2) assess the quality of retrieved documents, and (3) enhance the model's ability to utilize context. Based on these findings, we propose several strategies to enhance RAG's efficiency and effectiveness through expert activation. Experimental results across various datasets and MoE-based LLMs show the effectiveness of our method.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances language models by retrieving and incorporating relevant external knowledge. However, traditional retrieve-and-generate processes may not be optimized for real-world scenarios, where queries might require multiple retrieval steps or none at all. In this paper, we propose a Probing-RAG, which utilizes the hidden state representations from the intermediate layers of language models to adaptively determine the necessity of additional retrievals for a given query. By employing a pre-trained prober, Probing-RAG effectively captures the model's internal cognition, enabling reliable decision-making about retrieving external documents. Experimental results across five open-domain QA datasets demonstrate that Probing-RAG outperforms previous methods while reducing the number of redundant retrieval steps.

Fact-checking long-form text is challenging, and it is therefore common practice to break it down into multiple atomic claims. The typical approach to fact-checking these atomic claims involves retrieving a fixed number of pieces of evidence, followed by a verification step. However, this method is usually not cost-effective, as it underutilizes the verification model's internal knowledge of the claim and fails to replicate the iterative reasoning process in human search strategies. To address these limitations, we propose FIRE, a novel agent-based framework that integrates evidence retrieval and claim verification in an iterative manner. Specifically, FIRE employs a unified mechanism to decide whether to provide a final answer or generate a subsequent search query, based on its confidence in the current judgment. We compare FIRE with other strong fact-checking frameworks and find that it achieves slightly better performance while reducing large language model (LLM) costs by an average of 7.6 times and search costs by 16.5 times. These results indicate that FIRE holds promise for application in large-scale fact-checking operations. Our code is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/fire.git.

Embedding models play a crucial role in representing and retrieving information across various NLP applications. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have further enhanced the performance of embedding models, which are trained on massive amounts of text covering almost every domain. These models are often benchmarked on general-purpose datasets like Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), where they demonstrate superior performance. However, a critical question arises: Is the development of domain-specific embedding models necessary when general-purpose models are trained on vast corpora that already include specialized domain texts? In this paper, we empirically investigate this question, choosing the finance domain as an example. We introduce the Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (FinMTEB), a counterpart to MTEB that consists of financial domain-specific text datasets. We evaluate the performance of seven state-of-the-art embedding models on FinMTEB and observe a significant performance drop compared to their performance on MTEB. To account for the possibility that this drop is driven by FinMTEB's higher complexity, we propose four measures to quantify dataset complexity and control for this factor in our analysis. Our analysis provides compelling evidence that state-of-the-art embedding models struggle to capture domain-specific linguistic and semantic patterns, even when trained on large general-purpose corpora. This study sheds light on the necessity of developing domain-specific embedding models in the LLM era, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing and generating content across multiple data modalities, including text, images, audio, and video. However, a significant drawback of MLLMs is their reliance on static training data, leading to outdated information and limited contextual awareness. This static nature hampers their ability to provide accurate, up-to-date responses, particularly in dynamic or rapidly evolving contexts. Integrating Multimodal Retrieval-augmented Generation (Multimodal RAG) offers a promising solution, but the system would inevitably encounter the multi-granularity noisy correspondence (MNC) problem, which involves two types of noise: coarse-grained (query-caption) and fine-grained (query-image). This noise hinders accurate retrieval and generation. In this work, we propose RagLLaVA, a novel framework with knowledge-enhanced reranking and noise-injected training, to address these limitations. We instruction-tune the MLLM with a simple yet effective instruction template to induce its ranking ability and serve it as a reranker to precisely filter the top-k retrieved images. For generation, we inject visual noise during training at the data and token levels to enhance the generator's robustness. Extensive experiments are conducted on the subsets of two datasets that require retrieving and reasoning over images to answer a given query. Our results demonstrate the superiority of RagLLaVA in retrieving accurately and generating robustly. Code and models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-FinAI/RagLLaVA.

Semantic code search, retrieving code that matches a given natural language query, is an important task to improve productivity in software engineering. Existing code search datasets are problematic: either using unrealistic queries, or with mismatched codes, and typically using one-to-one query-code pairing, which fails to reflect the reality that a query might have multiple valid code matches. This paper introduces CoSQA+, pairing high-quality queries (reused from CoSQA) with multiple suitable codes. We collect code candidates from diverse sources and form candidate pairs by pairing queries with these codes. Utilizing the power of large language models (LLMs), we automate pair annotation, filtering, and code generation for queries without suitable matches. Through extensive experiments, CoSQA+ has demonstrated superior quality over CoSQA. Models trained on CoSQA+ exhibit improved performance. Furthermore, we propose a new metric Mean Multi-choice Reciprocal Rank (MMRR), to assess one-to-N code search performance. We provide the code and data at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/CoSQA_Plus.

A vital aspect of Indian Classical Music (ICM) is Raga, which serves as a melodic framework for compositions and improvisations alike. Raga Recognition is an important music information retrieval task in ICM as it can aid numerous downstream applications ranging from music recommendations to organizing huge music collections. In this work, we propose a deep learning based approach to Raga recognition. Our approach employs efficient pre possessing and learns temporal sequences in music data using Long Short Term Memory based Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNN). We train and test the network on smaller sequences sampled from the original audio while the final inference is performed on the audio as a whole. Our method achieves an accuracy of 88.1% and 97 % during inference on the Comp Music Carnatic dataset and its 10 Raga subset respectively making it the state-of-the-art for the Raga recognition task. Our approach also enables sequence ranking which aids us in retrieving melodic patterns from a given music data base that are closely related to the presented query sequence.

Creating neural text encoders for written Swiss German is challenging due to a dearth of training data combined with dialectal variation. In this paper, we build on several existing multilingual encoders and adapt them to Swiss German using continued pre-training. Evaluation on three diverse downstream tasks shows that simply adding a Swiss German adapter to a modular encoder achieves 97.5% of fully monolithic adaptation performance. We further find that for the task of retrieving Swiss German sentences given Standard German queries, adapting a character-level model is more effective than the other adaptation strategies. We release our code and the models trained for our experiments at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/swiss-german-text-encoders

Composed image retrieval (CIR) is the task of retrieving specific images by using a query that involves both a reference image and a relative caption. Most existing CIR models adopt the late-fusion strategy to combine visual and language features. Besides, several approaches have also been suggested to generate a pseudo-word token from the reference image, which is further integrated into the relative caption for CIR. However, these pseudo-word-based prompting methods have limitations when target image encompasses complex changes on reference image, e.g., object removal and attribute modification. In this work, we demonstrate that learning an appropriate sentence-level prompt for the relative caption (SPRC) is sufficient for achieving effective composed image retrieval. Instead of relying on pseudo-word-based prompts, we propose to leverage pretrained V-L models, e.g., BLIP-2, to generate sentence-level prompts. By concatenating the learned sentence-level prompt with the relative caption, one can readily use existing text-based image retrieval models to enhance CIR performance. Furthermore, we introduce both image-text contrastive loss and text prompt alignment loss to enforce the learning of suitable sentence-level prompts. Experiments show that our proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art CIR methods on the Fashion-IQ and CIRR datasets. The source code and pretrained model are publicly available at https://github.com/chunmeifeng/SPRC

Blind and low vision (BLV) creators use images to communicate with sighted audiences. However, creating or retrieving images is challenging for BLV creators as it is difficult to use authoring tools or assess image search results. Thus, creators limit the types of images they create or recruit sighted collaborators. While text-to-image generation models let creators generate high-fidelity images based on a text description (i.e. prompt), it is difficult to assess the content and quality of generated images. We present GenAssist, a system to make text-to-image generation accessible. Using our interface, creators can verify whether generated image candidates followed the prompt, access additional details in the image not specified in the prompt, and skim a summary of similarities and differences between image candidates. To power the interface, GenAssist uses a large language model to generate visual questions, vision-language models to extract answers, and a large language model to summarize the results. Our study with 12 BLV creators demonstrated that GenAssist enables and simplifies the process of image selection and generation, making visual authoring more accessible to all.

Source separation involves the ill-posed problem of retrieving a set of source signals that have been observed through a mixing operator. Solving this problem requires prior knowledge, which is commonly incorporated by imposing regularity conditions on the source signals, or implicitly learned through supervised or unsupervised methods from existing data. While data-driven methods have shown great promise in source separation, they often require large amounts of data, which rarely exists in planetary space missions. To address this challenge, we propose an unsupervised source separation scheme for domains with limited data access that involves solving an optimization problem in the wavelet scattering covariance representation spacex2014an interpretable, low-dimensional representation of stationary processes. We present a real-data example in which we remove transient, thermally-induced microtiltsx2014known as glitchesx2014from data recorded by a seismometer during NASA's InSight mission on Mars. Thanks to the wavelet scattering covariances' ability to capture non-Gaussian properties of stochastic processes, we are able to separate glitches using only a few glitch-free data snippets.

Information seeking users often pose questions with false presuppositions, especially when asking about unfamiliar topics. Most existing question answering (QA) datasets, in contrast, assume all questions have well defined answers. We introduce CREPE, a QA dataset containing a natural distribution of presupposition failures from online information-seeking forums. We find that 25% of questions contain false presuppositions, and provide annotations for these presuppositions and their corrections. Through extensive baseline experiments, we show that adaptations of existing open-domain QA models can find presuppositions moderately well, but struggle when predicting whether a presupposition is factually correct. This is in large part due to difficulty in retrieving relevant evidence passages from a large text corpus. CREPE provides a benchmark to study question answering in the wild, and our analyses provide avenues for future work in better modeling and further studying the task.

While language Models store a massive amount of world knowledge implicitly in their parameters, even very large models often fail to encode information about rare entities and events, while incurring huge computational costs. Recently, retrieval-augmented models, such as REALM, RAG, and RETRO, have incorporated world knowledge into language generation by leveraging an external non-parametric index and have demonstrated impressive performance with constrained model sizes. However, these methods are restricted to retrieving only textual knowledge, neglecting the ubiquitous amount of knowledge in other modalities like images -- much of which contains information not covered by any text. To address this limitation, we propose the first Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Transformer (MuRAG), which accesses an external non-parametric multimodal memory to augment language generation. MuRAG is pre-trained with a mixture of large-scale image-text and text-only corpora using a joint contrastive and generative loss. We perform experiments on two different datasets that require retrieving and reasoning over both images and text to answer a given query: WebQA, and MultimodalQA. Our results show that MuRAG achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, outperforming existing models by 10-20\% absolute on both datasets and under both distractor and full-wiki settings.

We present ScienceWorld, a benchmark to test agents' scientific reasoning abilities in a new interactive text environment at the level of a standard elementary school science curriculum. Despite the transformer-based progress seen in question-answering and scientific text processing, we find that current models cannot reason about or explain learned science concepts in novel contexts. For instance, models can easily answer what the conductivity of a known material is but struggle when asked how they would conduct an experiment in a grounded environment to find the conductivity of an unknown material. This begs the question of whether current models are simply retrieving answers by way of seeing a large number of similar examples or if they have learned to reason about concepts in a reusable manner. We hypothesize that agents need to be grounded in interactive environments to achieve such reasoning capabilities. Our experiments provide empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis -- showing that a 1.5 million parameter agent trained interactively for 100k steps outperforms a 11 billion parameter model statically trained for scientific question-answering and reasoning from millions of expert demonstrations.

Statutory article retrieval is the task of automatically retrieving law articles relevant to a legal question. While recent advances in natural language processing have sparked considerable interest in many legal tasks, statutory article retrieval remains primarily untouched due to the scarcity of large-scale and high-quality annotated datasets. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Belgian Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset (BSARD), which consists of 1,100+ French native legal questions labeled by experienced jurists with relevant articles from a corpus of 22,600+ Belgian law articles. Using BSARD, we benchmark several state-of-the-art retrieval approaches, including lexical and dense architectures, both in zero-shot and supervised setups. We find that fine-tuned dense retrieval models significantly outperform other systems. Our best performing baseline achieves 74.8% R@100, which is promising for the feasibility of the task and indicates there is still room for improvement. By the specificity of the domain and addressed task, BSARD presents a unique challenge problem for future research on legal information retrieval. Our dataset and source code are publicly available.

In this paper, we present a fast exemplar-based image colorization approach using color embeddings named Color2Embed. Generally, due to the difficulty of obtaining input and ground truth image pairs, it is hard to train a exemplar-based colorization model with unsupervised and unpaired training manner. Current algorithms usually strive to achieve two procedures: i) retrieving a large number of reference images with high similarity for preparing training dataset, which is inevitably time-consuming and tedious; ii) designing complicated modules to transfer the colors of the reference image to the target image, by calculating and leveraging the deep semantic correspondence between them (e.g., non-local operation), which is computationally expensive during testing. Contrary to the previous methods, we adopt a self-augmented self-reference learning scheme, where the reference image is generated by graphical transformations from the original colorful one whereby the training can be formulated in a paired manner. Second, in order to reduce the process time, our method explicitly extracts the color embeddings and exploits a progressive style feature Transformation network, which injects the color embeddings into the reconstruction of the final image. Such design is much more lightweight and intelligible, achieving appealing performance with fast processing speed.

Retrieval question answering (ReQA) is the task of retrieving a sentence-level answer to a question from an open corpus (Ahmad et al.,2019).This paper presents MultiReQA, anew multi-domain ReQA evaluation suite com-posed of eight retrieval QA tasks drawn from publicly available QA datasets. We provide the first systematic retrieval based evaluation over these datasets using two supervised neural models, based on fine-tuning BERT andUSE-QA models respectively, as well as a surprisingly strong information retrieval baseline,BM25. Five of these tasks contain both train-ing and test data, while three contain test data only. Performance on the five tasks with train-ing data shows that while a general model covering all domains is achievable, the best performance is often obtained by training exclusively on in-domain data.

We present Gecko, a compact and versatile text embedding model. Gecko achieves strong retrieval performance by leveraging a key idea: distilling knowledge from large language models (LLMs) into a retriever. Our two-step distillation process begins with generating diverse, synthetic paired data using an LLM. Next, we further refine the data quality by retrieving a set of candidate passages for each query, and relabeling the positive and hard negative passages using the same LLM. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by the compactness of the Gecko. On the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), Gecko with 256 embedding dimensions outperforms all existing entries with 768 embedding size. Gecko with 768 embedding dimensions achieves an average score of 66.31, competing with 7x larger models and 5x higher dimensional embeddings.

Personalization plays a critical role in numerous language tasks and applications, since users with the same requirements may prefer diverse outputs based on their individual interests. This has led to the development of various personalized approaches aimed at adapting large language models (LLMs) to generate customized outputs aligned with user preferences. Some of them involve fine-tuning a unique personalized LLM for each user, which is too expensive for widespread application. Alternative approaches introduce personalization information in a plug-and-play manner by retrieving the user's relevant historical texts as demonstrations. However, this retrieval-based strategy may break the continuity of the user history and fail to capture the user's overall styles and patterns, hence leading to sub-optimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel personalized LLM model, . It constructs a user-specific embedding for each individual by modeling all her historical contexts through a lightweight plug-in user embedder module. By attaching this embedding to the task input, LLMs can better understand and capture user habits and preferences, thereby producing more personalized outputs without tuning their own parameters. Extensive experiments on various tasks in the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing personalized LLM approaches.

With the increasing numbers of publicly available models, there are probably pretrained, online models for most tasks users require. However, current model search methods are rudimentary, essentially a text-based search in the documentation, thus users cannot find the relevant models. This paper presents ProbeLog, a method for retrieving classification models that can recognize a target concept, such as "Dog", without access to model metadata or training data. Differently from previous probing methods, ProbeLog computes a descriptor for each output dimension (logit) of each model, by observing its responses on a fixed set of inputs (probes). Our method supports both logit-based retrieval ("find more logits like this") and zero-shot, text-based retrieval ("find all logits corresponding to dogs"). As probing-based representations require multiple costly feedforward passes through the model, we develop a method, based on collaborative filtering, that reduces the cost of encoding repositories by 3x. We demonstrate that ProbeLog achieves high retrieval accuracy, both in real-world and fine-grained search tasks and is scalable to full-size repositories.

Image retrieval, i.e., finding desired images given a reference image, inherently encompasses rich, multi-faceted search intents that are difficult to capture solely using image-based measures. Recent work leverages text instructions to allow users to more freely express their search intents. However, existing work primarily focuses on image pairs that are visually similar and/or can be characterized by a small set of pre-defined relations. The core thesis of this paper is that text instructions can enable retrieving images with richer relations beyond visual similarity. To show this, we introduce MagicLens, a series of self-supervised image retrieval models that support open-ended instructions. MagicLens is built on a key novel insight: image pairs that naturally occur on the same web pages contain a wide range of implicit relations (e.g., inside view of), and we can bring those implicit relations explicit by synthesizing instructions via large multimodal models (LMMs) and large language models (LLMs). Trained on 36.7M (query image, instruction, target image) triplets with rich semantic relations mined from the web, MagicLens achieves comparable or better results on eight benchmarks of various image retrieval tasks than prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Remarkably, it outperforms previous SOTA but with a 50X smaller model size on multiple benchmarks. Additional human analyses on a 1.4M-image unseen corpus further demonstrate the diversity of search intents supported by MagicLens.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting for language models demonstrates impressive performance across reasoning tasks, but typically needs labeled exemplars of the reasoning process. In this work, we introduce a new prompting approach, Analogical Prompting, designed to automatically guide the reasoning process of large language models. Inspired by analogical reasoning, a cognitive process in which humans draw from relevant past experiences to tackle new problems, our approach prompts language models to self-generate relevant exemplars or knowledge in the context, before proceeding to solve the given problem. This method presents several advantages: it obviates the need for labeling or retrieving exemplars, offering generality and convenience; it can also tailor the generated exemplars and knowledge to each problem, offering adaptability. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms 0-shot CoT and manual few-shot CoT in a variety of reasoning tasks, including math problem solving in GSM8K and MATH, code generation in Codeforces, and other reasoning tasks in BIG-Bench.

Recent advances in retrieval-augmented models for image captioning highlight the benefit of retrieving related captions for efficient, lightweight models with strong domain-transfer capabilities. While these models demonstrate the success of retrieval augmentation, retrieval models are still far from perfect in practice: the retrieved information can sometimes mislead the model, resulting in incorrect generation and worse performance. In this paper, we analyze the robustness of a retrieval-augmented captioning model SmallCap. Our analysis shows that the model is sensitive to tokens that appear in the majority of the retrieved captions, and the input attribution shows that those tokens are likely copied into the generated output. Given these findings, we propose to train the model by sampling retrieved captions from more diverse sets. This decreases the chance that the model learns to copy majority tokens, and improves both in-domain and cross-domain performance.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have gained prominence for outstanding scalability and extraordinary performance in generative tasks. However, their considerable inference costs impede practical deployment. The feature cache mechanism, which involves storing and retrieving redundant computations across timesteps, holds promise for reducing per-step inference time in diffusion models. Most existing caching methods for DiT are manually designed. Although the learning-based approach attempts to optimize strategies adaptively, it suffers from discrepancies between training and inference, which hampers both the performance and acceleration ratio. Upon detailed analysis, we pinpoint that these discrepancies primarily stem from two aspects: (1) Prior Timestep Disregard, where training ignores the effect of cache usage at earlier timesteps, and (2) Objective Mismatch, where the training target (align predicted noise in each timestep) deviates from the goal of inference (generate the high-quality image). To alleviate these discrepancies, we propose HarmoniCa, a novel method that Harmonizes training and inference with a novel learning-based Caching framework built upon Step-Wise Denoising Training (SDT) and Image Error Proxy-Guided Objective (IEPO). Compared to the traditional training paradigm, the newly proposed SDT maintains the continuity of the denoising process, enabling the model to leverage information from prior timesteps during training, similar to the way it operates during inference. Furthermore, we design IEPO, which integrates an efficient proxy mechanism to approximate the final image error caused by reusing the cached feature. Therefore, IEPO helps balance final image quality and cache utilization, resolving the issue of training that only considers the impact of cache usage on the predicted output at each timestep.

Code completion models have made significant progress in recent years, yet current popular evaluation datasets, such as HumanEval and MBPP, predominantly focus on code completion tasks within a single file. This over-simplified setting falls short of representing the real-world software development scenario where repositories span multiple files with numerous cross-file dependencies, and accessing and understanding cross-file context is often required to complete the code correctly. To fill in this gap, we propose CrossCodeEval, a diverse and multilingual code completion benchmark that necessitates an in-depth cross-file contextual understanding to complete the code accurately. CrossCodeEval is built on a diverse set of real-world, open-sourced, permissively-licensed repositories in four popular programming languages: Python, Java, TypeScript, and C#. To create examples that strictly require cross-file context for accurate completion, we propose a straightforward yet efficient static-analysis-based approach to pinpoint the use of cross-file context within the current file. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art code language models like CodeGen and StarCoder demonstrate that CrossCodeEval is extremely challenging when the relevant cross-file context is absent, and we see clear improvements when adding these context into the prompt. However, despite such improvements, the pinnacle of performance remains notably unattained even with the highest-performing model, indicating that CrossCodeEval is also capable of assessing model's capability in leveraging extensive context to make better code completion. Finally, we benchmarked various methods in retrieving cross-file context, and show that CrossCodeEval can also be used to measure the capability of code retrievers.

We present TANGO, a framework for generating co-speech body-gesture videos. Given a few-minute, single-speaker reference video and target speech audio, TANGO produces high-fidelity videos with synchronized body gestures. TANGO builds on Gesture Video Reenactment (GVR), which splits and retrieves video clips using a directed graph structure - representing video frames as nodes and valid transitions as edges. We address two key limitations of GVR: audio-motion misalignment and visual artifacts in GAN-generated transition frames. In particular, (i) we propose retrieving gestures using latent feature distance to improve cross-modal alignment. To ensure the latent features could effectively model the relationship between speech audio and gesture motion, we implement a hierarchical joint embedding space (AuMoCLIP); (ii) we introduce the diffusion-based model to generate high-quality transition frames. Our diffusion model, Appearance Consistent Interpolation (ACInterp), is built upon AnimateAnyone and includes a reference motion module and homography background flow to preserve appearance consistency between generated and reference videos. By integrating these components into the graph-based retrieval framework, TANGO reliably produces realistic, audio-synchronized videos and outperforms all existing generative and retrieval methods. Our codes and pretrained models are available: https://pantomatrix.github.io/TANGO/

Understanding telecom standards involves sorting through numerous technical documents, such as those produced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. While large language models (LLMs) can assist with the extensive 3GPP knowledge base, an inclusive dataset is crucial for their effective pre-training and fine-tuning. In this paper, we introduce TSpec-LLM, an open-source comprehensive dataset covering all 3GPP documents from Release 8 to Release 19 (1999--2023). To evaluate its efficacy, we first select a representative sample of 3GPP documents, create corresponding technical questions, and assess the baseline performance of various LLMs. We then incorporate a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework to enhance LLM capabilities by retrieving relevant context from the TSpec-LLM dataset. Our evaluation shows that using a naive-RAG framework on TSpec-LLM improves the accuracy of GPT-3.5, Gemini 1.0 Pro, and GPT-4 from 44\%, 46\%, and 51\% to 71\%, 75\%, and 72\%, respectively.

In the field of urban planning, general-purpose large language models often struggle to meet the specific needs of planners. Tasks like generating urban planning texts, retrieving related information, and evaluating planning documents pose unique challenges. To enhance the efficiency of urban professionals and overcome these obstacles, we introduce PlanGPT, the first specialized Large Language Model tailored for urban and spatial planning. Developed through collaborative efforts with institutions like the Chinese Academy of Urban Planning, PlanGPT leverages a customized local database retrieval framework, domain-specific fine-tuning of base models, and advanced tooling capabilities. Empirical tests demonstrate that PlanGPT has achieved advanced performance, delivering responses of superior quality precisely tailored to the intricacies of urban planning.

In customer service technical support, swiftly and accurately retrieving relevant past issues is critical for efficiently resolving customer inquiries. The conventional retrieval methods in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for large language models (LLMs) treat a large corpus of past issue tracking tickets as plain text, ignoring the crucial intra-issue structure and inter-issue relations, which limits performance. We introduce a novel customer service question-answering method that amalgamates RAG with a knowledge graph (KG). Our method constructs a KG from historical issues for use in retrieval, retaining the intra-issue structure and inter-issue relations. During the question-answering phase, our method parses consumer queries and retrieves related sub-graphs from the KG to generate answers. This integration of a KG not only improves retrieval accuracy by preserving customer service structure information but also enhances answering quality by mitigating the effects of text segmentation. Empirical assessments on our benchmark datasets, utilizing key retrieval (MRR, Recall@K, NDCG@K) and text generation (BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR) metrics, reveal that our method outperforms the baseline by 77.6% in MRR and by 0.32 in BLEU. Our method has been deployed within LinkedIn's customer service team for approximately six months and has reduced the median per-issue resolution time by 28.6%.

Community Question Answering (CQA) in different domains is growing at a large scale because of the availability of several platforms and huge shareable information among users. With the rapid growth of such online platforms, a massive amount of archived data makes it difficult for moderators to retrieve possible duplicates for a new question and identify and confirm existing question pairs as duplicates at the right time. This problem is even more critical in CQAs corresponding to large software systems like askubuntu where moderators need to be experts to comprehend something as a duplicate. Note that the prime challenge in such CQA platforms is that the moderators are themselves experts and are therefore usually extremely busy with their time being extraordinarily expensive. To facilitate the task of the moderators, in this work, we have tackled two significant issues for the askubuntu CQA platform: (1) retrieval of duplicate questions given a new question and (2) duplicate question confirmation time prediction. In the first task, we focus on retrieving duplicate questions from a question pool for a particular newly posted question. In the second task, we solve a regression problem to rank a pair of questions that could potentially take a long time to get confirmed as duplicates. For duplicate question retrieval, we propose a Siamese neural network based approach by exploiting both text and network-based features, which outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline techniques. Our method outperforms DupPredictor and DUPE by 5% and 7% respectively. For duplicate confirmation time prediction, we have used both the standard machine learning models and neural network along with the text and graph-based features. We obtain Spearman's rank correlation of 0.20 and 0.213 (statistically significant) for text and graph based features respectively.

Query expansion is a widely used technique to improve the recall of search systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to query expansion that leverages the generative abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional query expansion approaches such as Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) that relies on retrieving a good set of pseudo-relevant documents to expand queries, we rely on the generative and creative abilities of an LLM and leverage the knowledge inherent in the model. We study a variety of different prompts, including zero-shot, few-shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We find that CoT prompts are especially useful for query expansion as these prompts instruct the model to break queries down step-by-step and can provide a large number of terms related to the original query. Experimental results on MS-MARCO and BEIR demonstrate that query expansions generated by LLMs can be more powerful than traditional query expansion methods.

Statutory article retrieval (SAR), the task of retrieving statute law articles relevant to a legal question, is a promising application of legal text processing. In particular, high-quality SAR systems can improve the work efficiency of legal professionals and provide basic legal assistance to citizens in need at no cost. Unlike traditional ad-hoc information retrieval, where each document is considered a complete source of information, SAR deals with texts whose full sense depends on complementary information from the topological organization of statute law. While existing works ignore these domain-specific dependencies, we propose a novel graph-augmented dense statute retriever (G-DSR) model that incorporates the structure of legislation via a graph neural network to improve dense retrieval performance. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms strong retrieval baselines on a real-world expert-annotated SAR dataset.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves the response quality of large language models (LLMs) by retrieving knowledge from external databases. Typical RAG approaches split the text database into chunks, organizing them in a flat structure for efficient searches. To better capture the inherent dependencies and structured relationships across the text database, researchers propose to organize textual information into an indexing graph, known asgraph-based RAG. However, we argue that the limitation of current graph-based RAG methods lies in the redundancy of the retrieved information, rather than its insufficiency. Moreover, previous methods use a flat structure to organize retrieved information within the prompts, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose PathRAG, which retrieves key relational paths from the indexing graph, and converts these paths into textual form for prompting LLMs. Specifically, PathRAG effectively reduces redundant information with flow-based pruning, while guiding LLMs to generate more logical and coherent responses with path-based prompting. Experimental results show that PathRAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across six datasets and five evaluation dimensions. The code is available at the following link: https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/PathRAG

Effectively incorporating external knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for enhancing their capabilities and addressing real-world needs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective method for achieving this by retrieving the most relevant fragments into LLMs. However, the advancements in context window size for LLMs offer an alternative approach, raising the question of whether RAG remains necessary for effectively handling external knowledge. Several existing studies provide inconclusive comparisons between RAG and long-context (LC) LLMs, largely due to limitations in the benchmark designs. In this paper, we present LaRA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to rigorously compare RAG and LC LLMs. LaRA encompasses 2326 test cases across four practical QA task categories and three types of naturally occurring long texts. Through systematic evaluation of seven open-source and four proprietary LLMs, we find that the optimal choice between RAG and LC depends on a complex interplay of factors, including the model's parameter size, long-text capabilities, context length, task type, and the characteristics of the retrieved chunks. Our findings provide actionable guidelines for practitioners to effectively leverage both RAG and LC approaches in developing and deploying LLM applications. Our code and dataset is provided at: https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/LaRA{https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/LaRA}.

Efficiently processing and interpreting network data is critical for the operation of increasingly complex networks. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLM) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have improved data processing in network management. However, existing RAG methods like VectorRAG and GraphRAG struggle with the complexity and implicit nature of semi-structured technical data, leading to inefficiencies in time, cost, and retrieval. This paper introduces FastRAG, a novel RAG approach designed for semi-structured data. FastRAG employs schema learning and script learning to extract and structure data without needing to submit entire data sources to an LLM. It integrates text search with knowledge graph (KG) querying to improve accuracy in retrieving context-rich information. Evaluation results demonstrate that FastRAG provides accurate question answering, while improving up to 90% in time and 85% in cost compared to GraphRAG.

In knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering (OpenQA), Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to generate factual answers relying solely on their internal (parametric) knowledge. To address this limitation, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance LLMs by retrieving relevant information from external sources, thereby positioning the retriever as a pivotal component. Although dense retrieval demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, its training poses challenges due to the scarcity of ground-truth evidence, largely attributed to the high costs of human annotation. In this paper, we propose W-RAG by utilizing the ranking capabilities of LLMs to create weakly labeled data for training dense retrievers. Specifically, we rerank the top-K passages retrieved via BM25 by assessing the probability that LLMs will generate the correct answer based on the question and each passage. The highest-ranking passages are then used as positive training examples for dense retrieval. Our comprehensive experiments across four publicly available OpenQA datasets demonstrate that our approach enhances both retrieval and OpenQA performance compared to baseline models.

This paper introduces Fundus, a user-friendly news scraper that enables users to obtain millions of high-quality news articles with just a few lines of code. Unlike existing news scrapers, we use manually crafted, bespoke content extractors that are specifically tailored to the formatting guidelines of each supported online newspaper. This allows us to optimize our scraping for quality such that retrieved news articles are textually complete and without HTML artifacts. Further, our framework combines both crawling (retrieving HTML from the web or large web archives) and content extraction into a single pipeline. By providing a unified interface for a predefined collection of newspapers, we aim to make Fundus broadly usable even for non-technical users. This paper gives an overview of the framework, discusses our design choices, and presents a comparative evaluation against other popular news scrapers. Our evaluation shows that Fundus yields significantly higher quality extractions (complete and artifact-free news articles) than prior work. The framework is available on GitHub under https://github.com/flairNLP/fundus and can be simply installed using pip.

The conventional use of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture has proven effective for retrieving information from diverse documents. However, challenges arise in handling complex table queries, especially within PDF documents containing intricate tabular structures.This research introduces an innovative approach to enhance the accuracy of complex table queries in RAG-based systems. Our methodology involves storing PDFs in the retrieval database and extracting tabular content separately. The extracted tables undergo a process of context enrichment, concatenating headers with corresponding values. To ensure a comprehensive understanding of the enriched data, we employ a fine-tuned version of the Llama-2-chat language model for summarisation within the RAG architecture. Furthermore, we augment the tabular data with contextual sense using the ChatGPT 3.5 API through a one-shot prompt. This enriched data is then fed into the retrieval database alongside other PDFs. Our approach aims to significantly improve the precision of complex table queries, offering a promising solution to a longstanding challenge in information retrieval.

Generating accurate 3D reconstructions from endoscopic video is a promising avenue for longitudinal radiation-free analysis of sinus anatomy and surgical outcomes. Several methods for monocular reconstruction have been proposed, yielding visually pleasant 3D anatomical structures by retrieving relative camera poses with structure-from-motion-type algorithms and fusion of monocular depth estimates. However, due to the complex properties of the underlying algorithms and endoscopic scenes, the reconstruction pipeline may perform poorly or fail unexpectedly. Further, acquiring medical data conveys additional challenges, presenting difficulties in quantitatively benchmarking these models, understanding failure cases, and identifying critical components that contribute to their precision. In this work, we perform a quantitative analysis of a self-supervised approach for sinus reconstruction using endoscopic sequences paired with optical tracking and high-resolution computed tomography acquired from nine ex-vivo specimens. Our results show that the generated reconstructions are in high agreement with the anatomy, yielding an average point-to-mesh error of 0.91 mm between reconstructions and CT segmentations. However, in a point-to-point matching scenario, relevant for endoscope tracking and navigation, we found average target registration errors of 6.58 mm. We identified that pose and depth estimation inaccuracies contribute equally to this error and that locally consistent sequences with shorter trajectories generate more accurate reconstructions. These results suggest that achieving global consistency between relative camera poses and estimated depths with the anatomy is essential. In doing so, we can ensure proper synergy between all components of the pipeline for improved reconstructions that will facilitate clinical application of this innovative technology.

Large-scale open-domain dialogue data crawled from public social media has greatly improved the performance of dialogue models. However, long-turn dialogues are still highly scarce. Specifically, most dialogue sessions in existing corpora have less than three turns. To alleviate this issue, we propose the Retrieve, Reorganize and Rescale framework (Re^3Dial), which can automatically construct a billion-scale long-turn dialogue corpus from existing short-turn dialogue data. Re^3Dial first trains an Unsupervised Dense Session Retriever (UDSR) to capture semantic and discourse relationships within multi-turn dialogues for retrieving relevant and coherent sessions. It then reorganizes the short-turn dialogues into long-turn sessions via recursively retrieving and selecting the consecutive sessions with our proposed diversity sampling strategy. Extensive evaluations on multiple multi-turn dialogue benchmarks demonstrate that Re^3Dial consistently and significantly improves the dialogue model's ability to utilize long-term context for modeling multi-turn dialogues across different pre-training settings. Finally, we build a toolkit for efficiently rescaling dialogue corpus with Re^3Dial, which enables us to construct a corpus containing 1B Chinese dialogue sessions with 11.3 turns on average (5X longer than the original EVA corpus). We will release our UDSR model, toolkit, and data for public use.

Large decoder-only language models (LMs) can be largely improved in terms of perplexity by retrieval (e.g., RETRO), but its impact on text generation quality and downstream task accuracy is unclear. Thus, it is still an open question: shall we pretrain large autoregressive LMs with retrieval? To answer it, we perform a comprehensive study on a scalable pre-trained retrieval-augmented LM (i.e., RETRO) compared with standard GPT and retrieval-augmented GPT incorporated at fine-tuning or inference stages. We first provide the recipe to reproduce RETRO up to 9.5B parameters while retrieving a text corpus with 330B tokens. Based on that, we have the following novel findings: i) RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with much less degeneration (i.e., repetition), moderately higher factual accuracy, and slightly lower toxicity with a nontoxic retrieval database. ii) On the LM Evaluation Harness benchmark, RETRO largely outperforms GPT on knowledge-intensive tasks, but is on par with GPT on other tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a simple variant of the model, RETRO++, which largely improves open-domain QA results of original RETRO (e.g., EM score +8.6 on Natural Question) and significantly outperforms retrieval-augmented GPT in both fine-tuning and zero-shot evaluation settings. Our findings highlight the promising direction of pretraining autoregressive LMs with retrieval as future foundation models. We release our implementation at: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM#retro.

Many applications require grouping instances contained in diverse document datasets into classes. Most widely used methods do not employ deep learning and do not exploit the inherently multimodal nature of documents. Notably, record linkage is typically conceptualized as a string-matching problem. This study develops CLIPPINGS, (Contrastively Linking Pooled Pre-trained Embeddings), a multimodal framework for record linkage. CLIPPINGS employs end-to-end training of symmetric vision and language bi-encoders, aligned through contrastive language-image pre-training, to learn a metric space where the pooled image-text representation for a given instance is close to representations in the same class and distant from representations in different classes. At inference time, instances can be linked by retrieving their nearest neighbor from an offline exemplar embedding index or by clustering their representations. The study examines two challenging applications: constructing comprehensive supply chains for mid-20th century Japan through linking firm level financial records - with each firm name represented by its crop in the document image and the corresponding OCR - and detecting which image-caption pairs in a massive corpus of historical U.S. newspapers came from the same underlying photo wire source. CLIPPINGS outperforms widely used string matching methods by a wide margin and also outperforms unimodal methods. Moreover, a purely self-supervised model trained on only image-OCR pairs also outperforms popular string-matching methods without requiring any labels.

Retrieval-augmented language models such as Fusion-in-Decoder are powerful, setting the state of the art on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks. However, they are also expensive, due to the need to encode a large number of retrieved passages. Some work avoids this cost by pre-encoding a text corpus into a memory and retrieving dense representations directly. However, pre-encoding memory incurs a severe quality penalty as the memory representations are not conditioned on the current input. We propose LUMEN, a hybrid between these two extremes, pre-computing the majority of the retrieval representation and completing the encoding on the fly using a live encoder that is conditioned on the question and fine-tuned for the task. We show that LUMEN significantly outperforms pure memory on multiple question-answering tasks while being much cheaper than FiD, and outperforms both for any given compute budget. Moreover, the advantage of LUMEN over FiD increases with model size.

The ability to integrate context, including perceptual and temporal cues, plays a pivotal role in grounding the meaning of a linguistic utterance. In order to measure to what extent current vision-and-language models master this ability, we devise a new multimodal challenge, Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions (ImageCoDe). In particular, models are tasked with retrieving the correct image from a set of 10 minimally contrastive candidates based on a contextual description. As such, each description contains only the details that help distinguish between images. Because of this, descriptions tend to be complex in terms of syntax and discourse and require drawing pragmatic inferences. Images are sourced from both static pictures and video frames. We benchmark several state-of-the-art models, including both cross-encoders such as ViLBERT and bi-encoders such as CLIP, on ImageCoDe. Our results reveal that these models dramatically lag behind human performance: the best variant achieves an accuracy of 20.9 on video frames and 59.4 on static pictures, compared with 90.8 in humans. Furthermore, we experiment with new model variants that are better equipped to incorporate visual and temporal context into their representations, which achieve modest gains. Our hope is that ImageCoDE will foster progress in grounded language understanding by encouraging models to focus on fine-grained visual differences.

While large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for machine translation (MT), their performance for specialist domains such as medicine and law remains an open challenge. Prior work has shown that LLMs can be domain-adapted at test-time by retrieving targeted few-shot demonstrations or terminologies for inclusion in the prompt. Meanwhile, for general-purpose LLM MT, recent studies have found some success in generating similarly useful domain knowledge from an LLM itself, prior to translation. Our work studies domain-adapted MT with LLMs through a careful prompting setup, finding that demonstrations consistently outperform terminology, and retrieval consistently outperforms generation. We find that generating demonstrations with weaker models can close the gap with larger model's zero-shot performance. Given the effectiveness of demonstrations, we perform detailed analyses to understand their value. We find that domain-specificity is particularly important, and that the popular multi-domain benchmark is testing adaptation to a particular writing style more so than to a specific domain.

Bilingual lexical processing is shaped by the complex interplay of phonological, orthographic, and semantic features of two languages within an integrated mental lexicon. In humans, this is evident in the ease with which cognate words - words similar in both orthographic form and meaning (e.g., blind, meaning "sightless" in both English and German) - are processed, compared to the challenges posed by interlingual homographs, which share orthographic form but differ in meaning (e.g., gift, meaning "present" in English but "poison" in German). We investigate how multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) handle such phenomena, focusing on English-Spanish, English-French, and English-German cognates, non-cognate, and interlingual homographs. Specifically, we evaluate their ability to disambiguate meanings and make semantic judgments, both when these word types are presented in isolation or within sentence contexts. Our findings reveal that while certain LLMs demonstrate strong performance in recognizing cognates and non-cognates in isolation, they exhibit significant difficulty in disambiguating interlingual homographs, often performing below random baselines. This suggests LLMs tend to rely heavily on orthographic similarities rather than semantic understanding when interpreting interlingual homographs. Further, we find LLMs exhibit difficulty in retrieving word meanings, with performance in isolative disambiguation tasks having no correlation with semantic understanding. Finally, we study how the LLM processes interlingual homographs in incongruent sentences. We find models to opt for different strategies in understanding English and non-English homographs, highlighting a lack of a unified approach to handling cross-lingual ambiguities.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique that enhances downstream task execution by retrieving additional information, such as knowledge, skills, and tools from external sources. Graph, by its intrinsic "nodes connected by edges" nature, encodes massive heterogeneous and relational information, making it a golden resource for RAG in tremendous real-world applications. As a result, we have recently witnessed increasing attention on equipping RAG with Graph, i.e., GraphRAG. However, unlike conventional RAG, where the retriever, generator, and external data sources can be uniformly designed in the neural-embedding space, the uniqueness of graph-structured data, such as diverse-formatted and domain-specific relational knowledge, poses unique and significant challenges when designing GraphRAG for different domains. Given the broad applicability, the associated design challenges, and the recent surge in GraphRAG, a systematic and up-to-date survey of its key concepts and techniques is urgently desired. Following this motivation, we present a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on GraphRAG. Our survey first proposes a holistic GraphRAG framework by defining its key components, including query processor, retriever, organizer, generator, and data source. Furthermore, recognizing that graphs in different domains exhibit distinct relational patterns and require dedicated designs, we review GraphRAG techniques uniquely tailored to each domain. Finally, we discuss research challenges and brainstorm directions to inspire cross-disciplinary opportunities. Our survey repository is publicly maintained at https://github.com/Graph-RAG/GraphRAG/.

In order to reduce the computational complexity of large language models, great efforts have been made to to improve the efficiency of transformer models such as linear attention and flash-attention. However, the model size and corresponding computational complexity are constantly scaled up in pursuit of higher performance. In this work, we present MemoryFormer, a novel transformer architecture which significantly reduces the computational complexity (FLOPs) from a new perspective. We eliminate nearly all the computations of the transformer model except for the necessary computation required by the multi-head attention operation. This is made possible by utilizing an alternative method for feature transformation to replace the linear projection of fully-connected layers. Specifically, we first construct a group of in-memory lookup tables that store a large amount of discrete vectors to replace the weight matrix used in linear projection. We then use a hash algorithm to retrieve a correlated subset of vectors dynamically based on the input embedding. The retrieved vectors combined together will form the output embedding, which provides an estimation of the result of matrix multiplication operation in a fully-connected layer. Compared to conducting matrix multiplication, retrieving data blocks from memory is a much cheaper operation which requires little computations. We train MemoryFormer from scratch and conduct extensive experiments on various benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating whether models can retrieve and utilize external textual knowledge for question answering. However, there are scenarios where retrieving visual information is either more beneficial or easier to access than textual data. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation benchmark, MRAG-Bench, in which we systematically identify and categorize scenarios where visually augmented knowledge is better than textual knowledge, for instance, more images from varying viewpoints. MRAG-Bench consists of 16,130 images and 1,353 human-annotated multiple-choice questions across 9 distinct scenarios. With MRAG-Bench, we conduct an evaluation of 10 open-source and 4 proprietary large vision-language models (LVLMs). Our results show that all LVLMs exhibit greater improvements when augmented with images compared to textual knowledge, confirming that MRAG-Bench is vision-centric. Additionally, we conduct extensive analysis with MRAG-Bench, which offers valuable insights into retrieval-augmented LVLMs. Notably, the top-performing model, GPT-4o, faces challenges in effectively leveraging retrieved knowledge, achieving only a 5.82% improvement with ground-truth information, in contrast to a 33.16% improvement observed in human participants. These findings highlight the importance of MRAG-Bench in encouraging the community to enhance LVLMs' ability to utilize retrieved visual knowledge more effectively.

Generative language models often struggle with specialized or less-discussed knowledge. A potential solution is found in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models which act like retrieving information before generating responses. In this study, we explore how the Atlas approach, a RAG model, decides between what it already knows (parametric) and what it retrieves (non-parametric). We use causal mediation analysis and controlled experiments to examine how internal representations influence information processing. Our findings disentangle the effects of parametric knowledge and the retrieved context. They indicate that in cases where the model can choose between both types of information (parametric and non-parametric), it relies more on the context than the parametric knowledge. Furthermore, the analysis investigates the computations involved in how the model uses the information from the context. We find that multiple mechanisms are active within the model and can be detected with mediation analysis: first, the decision of whether the context is relevant, and second, how the encoder computes output representations to support copying when relevant.

In this paper, we investigate Extractive Question Answering (EQA) with Large Language Models (LLMs) under domain drift, i.e., can LLMs generalize to domains that require specific knowledge such as medicine and law in a zero-shot fashion without additional in-domain training? To this end, we devise a series of experiments to explain the performance gap empirically. Our findings suggest that: (a) LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed domains such as retrieving long answer spans; (b) Certain LLMs, despite showing strong overall performance, display weaknesses in meeting basic requirements as discriminating between domain-specific senses of words which we link to pre-processing decisions; (c) Scaling model parameters is not always effective for cross domain generalization; and (d) Closed-domain datasets are quantitatively much different than open-domain EQA datasets and current LLMs struggle to deal with them. Our findings point out important directions for improving existing LLMs.

Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with information retrieval capabilities (i.e., Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)) has proven beneficial for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, understanding users' contextual search intent when generating responses is an understudied topic for conversational question answering (QA). This conversational extension leads to additional concerns when compared to single-turn QA as it is more challenging for systems to comprehend conversational context and manage retrieved passages over multiple turns. In this work, we propose a method for enabling LLMs to decide when to retrieve in RAG settings given a conversational context. When retrieval is deemed necessary, the LLM then rewrites the conversation for passage retrieval and judges the relevance of returned passages before response generation. Operationally, we build on the single-turn SELF-RAG framework (Asai et al., 2023) and propose SELF-multi-RAG for conversational settings. SELF-multi-RAG demonstrates improved capabilities over single-turn variants with respect to retrieving relevant passages (by using summarized conversational context) and assessing the quality of generated responses. Experiments on three conversational QA datasets validate the enhanced response generation capabilities of SELF-multi-RAG, with improvements of ~13% measured by human annotation.

Large language models (LLM) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various biomedical natural language processing (NLP) tasks, leveraging the demonstration within the input context to adapt to new tasks. However, LLM is sensitive to the selection of demonstrations. To address the hallucination issue inherent in LLM, retrieval-augmented LLM (RAL) offers a solution by retrieving pertinent information from an established database. Nonetheless, existing research work lacks rigorous evaluation of the impact of retrieval-augmented large language models on different biomedical NLP tasks. This deficiency makes it challenging to ascertain the capabilities of RAL within the biomedical domain. Moreover, the outputs from RAL are affected by retrieving the unlabeled, counterfactual, or diverse knowledge that is not well studied in the biomedical domain. However, such knowledge is common in the real world. Finally, exploring the self-awareness ability is also crucial for the RAL system. So, in this paper, we systematically investigate the impact of RALs on 5 different biomedical tasks (triple extraction, link prediction, classification, question answering, and natural language inference). We analyze the performance of RALs in four fundamental abilities, including unlabeled robustness, counterfactual robustness, diverse robustness, and negative awareness. To this end, we proposed an evaluation framework to assess the RALs' performance on different biomedical NLP tasks and establish four different testbeds based on the aforementioned fundamental abilities. Then, we evaluate 3 representative LLMs with 3 different retrievers on 5 tasks over 9 datasets.

Word embedding has become an essential means for text-based information retrieval. Typically, word embeddings are learned from large quantities of general and unstructured text data. However, in the domain of music, the word embedding may have difficulty understanding musical contexts or recognizing music-related entities like artists and tracks. To address this issue, we propose a new approach called Musical Word Embedding (MWE), which involves learning from various types of texts, including both everyday and music-related vocabulary. We integrate MWE into an audio-word joint representation framework for tagging and retrieving music, using words like tag, artist, and track that have different levels of musical specificity. Our experiments show that using a more specific musical word like track results in better retrieval performance, while using a less specific term like tag leads to better tagging performance. To balance this compromise, we suggest multi-prototype training that uses words with different levels of musical specificity jointly. We evaluate both word embedding and audio-word joint embedding on four tasks (tag rank prediction, music tagging, query-by-tag, and query-by-track) across two datasets (Million Song Dataset and MTG-Jamendo). Our findings show that the suggested MWE is more efficient and robust than the conventional word embedding.

Recent advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have initiated a new era in repository-level code completion. However, the invariable use of retrieval in existing methods exposes issues in both efficiency and robustness, with a large proportion of the retrieved contexts proving unhelpful or harmful to code language models (code LMs). In this paper, we propose a selective RAG framework to avoid retrieval when unnecessary. To power this framework, we design a self-supervised learning approach to enable a code LM to accurately self-evaluate whether retrieval can improve its output quality and robustly leverage the potentially noisy retrieved contexts. Using this LM as both the selective RAG policy and the generation model, our framework achieves state-of-the-art repository-level code completion performance on diverse benchmarks including RepoEval, CrossCodeEval, and CrossCodeLongEval, a new long-form code completion benchmark. Meanwhile, our analyses show that selectively retrieving brings as much as 70% inference speedup in the online serving setting without harming the performance. We further demonstrate that our framework is able to accommodate different generation models, retrievers, and programming languages. These advancements position our framework as an important step towards more accurate and efficient repository-level code completion.

Previous work has showcased the intriguing capability of large language models (LLMs) in retrieving facts and processing context knowledge. However, only limited research exists on the layer-wise capability of LLMs to encode knowledge, which challenges our understanding of their internal mechanisms. In this paper, we devote the first attempt to investigate the layer-wise capability of LLMs through probing tasks. We leverage the powerful generative capability of ChatGPT to construct probing datasets, providing diverse and coherent evidence corresponding to various facts. We employ mathcal V-usable information as the validation metric to better reflect the capability in encoding context knowledge across different layers. Our experiments on conflicting and newly acquired knowledge show that LLMs: (1) prefer to encode more context knowledge in the upper layers; (2) primarily encode context knowledge within knowledge-related entity tokens at lower layers while progressively expanding more knowledge within other tokens at upper layers; and (3) gradually forget the earlier context knowledge retained within the intermediate layers when provided with irrelevant evidence. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/probing_llama.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding and generating responses to complex queries through large-scale pre-training. However, the efficacy of these models in memorizing and reasoning among large-scale structured knowledge, especially world knowledge that explicitly covers abundant factual information remains questionable. Addressing this gap, our research investigates whether LLMs can effectively store, recall, and reason with knowledge on a large scale comparable to latest knowledge bases (KBs) such as Wikidata. Specifically, we focus on three crucial aspects to study the viability: (1) the efficiency of LLMs with different sizes in memorizing the exact knowledge in the large-scale KB; (2) the flexibility of recalling the memorized knowledge in response to natural language queries; (3) the capability to infer new knowledge through reasoning. Our findings indicate that while LLMs hold promise as large-scale KBs capable of retrieving and responding with flexibility, enhancements in their reasoning capabilities are necessary to fully realize their potential.

This paper presents a novel Chunking-Free In-Context (CFIC) retrieval approach, specifically tailored for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Traditional RAG systems often struggle with grounding responses using precise evidence text due to the challenges of processing lengthy documents and filtering out irrelevant content. Commonly employed solutions, such as document chunking and adapting language models to handle longer contexts, have their limitations. These methods either disrupt the semantic coherence of the text or fail to effectively address the issues of noise and inaccuracy in evidence retrieval. CFIC addresses these challenges by circumventing the conventional chunking process. It utilizes the encoded hidden states of documents for in-context retrieval, employing auto-aggressive decoding to accurately identify the specific evidence text required for user queries, eliminating the need for chunking. CFIC is further enhanced by incorporating two decoding strategies, namely Constrained Sentence Prefix Decoding and Skip Decoding. These strategies not only improve the efficiency of the retrieval process but also ensure that the fidelity of the generated grounding text evidence is maintained. Our evaluations of CFIC on a range of open QA datasets demonstrate its superiority in retrieving relevant and accurate evidence, offering a significant improvement over traditional methods. By doing away with the need for document chunking, CFIC presents a more streamlined, effective, and efficient retrieval solution, making it a valuable advancement in the field of RAG systems.

Similar case retrieval (SCR) is a representative legal AI application that plays a pivotal role in promoting judicial fairness. However, existing SCR datasets only focus on the fact description section when judging the similarity between cases, ignoring other valuable sections (e.g., the court's opinion) that can provide insightful reasoning process behind. Furthermore, the case similarities are typically measured solely by the textual semantics of the fact descriptions, which may fail to capture the full complexity of legal cases from the perspective of legal knowledge. In this work, we present MUSER, a similar case retrieval dataset based on multi-view similarity measurement and comprehensive legal element with sentence-level legal element annotations. Specifically, we select three perspectives (legal fact, dispute focus, and law statutory) and build a comprehensive and structured label schema of legal elements for each of them, to enable accurate and knowledgeable evaluation of case similarities. The constructed dataset originates from Chinese civil cases and contains 100 query cases and 4,024 candidate cases. We implement several text classification algorithms for legal element prediction and various retrieval methods for retrieving similar cases on MUSER. The experimental results indicate that incorporating legal elements can benefit the performance of SCR models, but further efforts are still required to address the remaining challenges posed by MUSER. The source code and dataset are released at https://github.com/THUlawtech/MUSER.

When re-finding items, users who forget or are uncertain about identifying details often rely on creative strategies for expressing their information needs -- complex queries that describe content elements (e.g., book characters or events), information beyond the document text (e.g., descriptions of book covers), or personal context (e.g., when they read a book). This retrieval setting, called tip of the tongue (TOT), is especially challenging for models heavily reliant on lexical and semantic overlap between query and document text. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective framework for handling such complex queries by decomposing the query into individual clues, routing those as sub-queries to specialized retrievers, and ensembling the results. This approach allows us to take advantage of off-the-shelf retrievers (e.g., CLIP for retrieving images of book covers) or incorporate retriever-specific logic (e.g., date constraints). We show that our framework incorportating query decompositions into retrievers can improve gold book recall up to 7% relative again for Recall@5 on a new collection of 14,441 real-world query-book pairs from an online community for resolving TOT inquiries.

Video activity localization aims at understanding the semantic content in long untrimmed videos and retrieving actions of interest. The retrieved action with its start and end locations can be used for highlight generation, temporal action detection, etc. Unfortunately, learning the exact boundary location of activities is highly challenging because temporal activities are continuous in time, and there are often no clear-cut transitions between actions. Moreover, the definition of the start and end of events is subjective, which may confuse the model. To alleviate the boundary ambiguity, we propose to study the video activity localization problem from a denoising perspective. Specifically, we propose an encoder-decoder model named DenoiseLoc. During training, a set of action spans is randomly generated from the ground truth with a controlled noise scale. Then we attempt to reverse this process by boundary denoising, allowing the localizer to predict activities with precise boundaries and resulting in faster convergence speed. Experiments show that DenoiseLoc advances %in several video activity understanding tasks. For example, we observe a gain of +12.36% average mAP on QV-Highlights dataset and +1.64% [email protected] on THUMOS'14 dataset over the baseline. Moreover, DenoiseLoc achieves state-of-the-art performance on TACoS and MAD datasets, but with much fewer predictions compared to other current methods.

A common thread of retrieval-augmented methods in the existing literature focuses on retrieving encyclopedic knowledge, such as Wikipedia, which facilitates well-defined entity and relation spaces that can be modeled. However, applying such methods to commonsense reasoning tasks faces two unique challenges, i.e., the lack of a general large-scale corpus for retrieval and a corresponding effective commonsense retriever. In this paper, we systematically investigate how to leverage commonsense knowledge retrieval to improve commonsense reasoning tasks. We proposed a unified framework of retrieval-augmented commonsense reasoning (called RACo), including a newly constructed commonsense corpus with over 20 million documents and novel strategies for training a commonsense retriever. We conducted experiments on four different commonsense reasoning tasks. Extensive evaluation results showed that our proposed RACo can significantly outperform other knowledge-enhanced method counterparts, achieving new SoTA performance on the CommonGen and CREAK leaderboards.

Dense retrieval models, which aim at retrieving the most relevant document for an input query on a dense representation space, have gained considerable attention for their remarkable success. Yet, dense models require a vast amount of labeled training data for notable performance, whereas it is often challenging to acquire query-document pairs annotated by humans. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple but effective Document Augmentation for dense Retrieval (DAR) framework, which augments the representations of documents with their interpolation and perturbation. We validate the performance of DAR on retrieval tasks with two benchmark datasets, showing that the proposed DAR significantly outperforms relevant baselines on the dense retrieval of both the labeled and unlabeled documents.

Open-domain extractive question answering works well on textual data by first retrieving candidate texts and then extracting the answer from those candidates. However, some questions cannot be answered by text alone but require information stored in tables. In this paper, we present an approach for retrieving both texts and tables relevant to a question by jointly encoding texts, tables and questions into a single vector space. To this end, we create a new multi-modal dataset based on text and table datasets from related work and compare the retrieval performance of different encoding schemata. We find that dense vector embeddings of transformer models outperform sparse embeddings on four out of six evaluation datasets. Comparing different dense embedding models, tri-encoders with one encoder for each question, text and table, increase retrieval performance compared to bi-encoders with one encoder for the question and one for both text and tables. We release the newly created multi-modal dataset to the community so that it can be used for training and evaluation.

There is a growing collection of work analyzing and mitigating societal biases in language understanding, generation, and retrieval tasks, though examining biases in creative tasks remains underexplored. Creative language applications are meant for direct interaction with users, so it is important to quantify and mitigate societal biases in these applications. We introduce a novel study on a pipeline to mitigate societal biases when retrieving next verse suggestions in a poetry composition system. Our results suggest that data augmentation through sentiment style transfer has potential for mitigating societal biases.

Supervised machine learning provides the learner with a set of input-output examples of the target task. Humans, however, can also learn to perform new tasks from instructions in natural language. Can machines learn to understand instructions as well? We present the Turking Test, which examines a model's ability to follow natural language instructions of varying complexity. These range from simple tasks, like retrieving the nth word of a sentence, to ones that require creativity, such as generating examples for SNLI and SQuAD in place of human intelligence workers ("turkers"). Despite our lenient evaluation methodology, we observe that a large pretrained language model performs poorly across all tasks. Analyzing the model's error patterns reveals that the model tends to ignore explicit instructions and often generates outputs that cannot be construed as an attempt to solve the task. While it is not yet clear whether instruction understanding can be captured by traditional language models, the sheer expressivity of instruction understanding makes it an appealing alternative to the rising few-shot inference paradigm.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a powerful strategy to address the issue of generating factually incorrect outputs in foundation models by retrieving external knowledge relevant to queries and incorporating it into their generation process. However, existing RAG approaches have primarily focused on textual information, with some recent advancements beginning to consider images, and they largely overlook videos, a rich source of multimodal knowledge capable of representing events, processes, and contextual details more effectively than any other modality. While a few recent studies explore the integration of videos in the response generation process, they either predefine query-associated videos without retrieving them according to queries, or convert videos into the textual descriptions without harnessing their multimodal richness. To tackle these, we introduce VideoRAG, a novel framework that not only dynamically retrieves relevant videos based on their relevance with queries but also utilizes both visual and textual information of videos in the output generation. Further, to operationalize this, our method revolves around the recent advance of Large Video Language Models (LVLMs), which enable the direct processing of video content to represent it for retrieval and seamless integration of the retrieved videos jointly with queries. We experimentally validate the effectiveness of VideoRAG, showcasing that it is superior to relevant baselines.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, but still struggle with processing extensive contexts, limiting their ability to maintain coherence and accuracy over long sequences. In contrast, the human brain excels at organising and retrieving episodic experiences across vast temporal scales, spanning a lifetime. In this work, we introduce EM-LLM, a novel approach that integrates key aspects of human episodic memory and event cognition into LLMs, enabling them to effectively handle practically infinite context lengths while maintaining computational efficiency. EM-LLM organises sequences of tokens into coherent episodic events using a combination of Bayesian surprise and graph-theoretic boundary refinement in an on-line fashion. When needed, these events are retrieved through a two-stage memory process, combining similarity-based and temporally contiguous retrieval for efficient and human-like access to relevant information. Experiments on the LongBench dataset demonstrate EM-LLM's superior performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art InfLLM model with an overall relative improvement of 4.3% across various tasks, including a 33% improvement on the PassageRetrieval task. Furthermore, our analysis reveals strong correlations between EM-LLM's event segmentation and human-perceived events, suggesting a bridge between this artificial system and its biological counterpart. This work not only advances LLM capabilities in processing extended contexts but also provides a computational framework for exploring human memory mechanisms, opening new avenues for interdisciplinary research in AI and cognitive science.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have issues with document question answering (QA) in situations where the document is unable to fit in the small context length of an LLM. To overcome this issue, most existing works focus on retrieving the relevant context from the document, representing them as plain text. However, documents such as PDFs, web pages, and presentations are naturally structured with different pages, tables, sections, and so on. Representing such structured documents as plain text is incongruous with the user's mental model of these documents with rich structure. When a system has to query the document for context, this incongruity is brought to the fore, and seemingly trivial questions can trip up the QA system. To bridge this fundamental gap in handling structured documents, we propose an approach called PDFTriage that enables models to retrieve the context based on either structure or content. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PDFTriage-augmented models across several classes of questions where existing retrieval-augmented LLMs fail. To facilitate further research on this fundamental problem, we release our benchmark dataset consisting of 900+ human-generated questions over 80 structured documents from 10 different categories of question types for document QA.

LLM agents have demonstrated remarkable performance across various applications, primarily due to their advanced capabilities in reasoning, utilizing external knowledge and tools, calling APIs, and executing actions to interact with environments. Current agents typically utilize a memory module or a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mechanism, retrieving past knowledge and instances with similar embeddings from knowledge bases to inform task planning and execution. However, the reliance on unverified knowledge bases raises significant concerns about their safety and trustworthiness. To uncover such vulnerabilities, we propose a novel red teaming approach AgentPoison, the first backdoor attack targeting generic and RAG-based LLM agents by poisoning their long-term memory or RAG knowledge base. In particular, we form the trigger generation process as a constrained optimization to optimize backdoor triggers by mapping the triggered instances to a unique embedding space, so as to ensure that whenever a user instruction contains the optimized backdoor trigger, the malicious demonstrations are retrieved from the poisoned memory or knowledge base with high probability. In the meantime, benign instructions without the trigger will still maintain normal performance. Unlike conventional backdoor attacks, AgentPoison requires no additional model training or fine-tuning, and the optimized backdoor trigger exhibits superior transferability, in-context coherence, and stealthiness. Extensive experiments demonstrate AgentPoison's effectiveness in attacking three types of real-world LLM agents: RAG-based autonomous driving agent, knowledge-intensive QA agent, and healthcare EHRAgent. On each agent, AgentPoison achieves an average attack success rate higher than 80% with minimal impact on benign performance (less than 1%) with a poison rate less than 0.1%.

Video content creators need efficient tools to repurpose content, a task that often requires complex manual or automated searches. Crafting a new video from large video libraries remains a challenge. In this paper we introduce the task of Video Library Question Answering (VLQA) through an interoperable architecture that applies Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to video libraries. We propose a system that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate search queries, retrieving relevant video moments indexed by speech and visual metadata. An answer generation module then integrates user queries with this metadata to produce responses with specific video timestamps. This approach shows promise in multimedia content retrieval, and AI-assisted video content creation.

In this paper, we present Cross Language Agent -- Simultaneous Interpretation, CLASI, a high-quality and human-like Simultaneous Speech Translation (SiST) System. Inspired by professional human interpreters, we utilize a novel data-driven read-write strategy to balance the translation quality and latency. To address the challenge of translating in-domain terminologies, CLASI employs a multi-modal retrieving module to obtain relevant information to augment the translation. Supported by LLMs, our approach can generate error-tolerated translation by considering the input audio, historical context, and retrieved information. Experimental results show that our system outperforms other systems by significant margins. Aligned with professional human interpreters, we evaluate CLASI with a better human evaluation metric, valid information proportion (VIP), which measures the amount of information that can be successfully conveyed to the listeners. In the real-world scenarios, where the speeches are often disfluent, informal, and unclear, CLASI achieves VIP of 81.3% and 78.0% for Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese translation directions, respectively. In contrast, state-of-the-art commercial or open-source systems only achieve 35.4% and 41.6%. On the extremely hard dataset, where other systems achieve under 13% VIP, CLASI can still achieve 70% VIP.

Despite the success of text retrieval in many NLP tasks, code retrieval remains a largely underexplored area. Most text retrieval systems are tailored for natural language queries, often neglecting the specific challenges of retrieving code. This gap leaves existing models unable to effectively capture the diversity of programming languages and tasks across different domains, highlighting the need for more focused research in code retrieval. To address this, we introduce CodeXEmbed, a family of large-scale code embedding models ranging from 400M to 7B parameters. Our novel training pipeline unifies multiple programming languages and transforms various code-related tasks into a common retrieval framework, enhancing model generalizability and retrieval performance. Our 7B model sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) in code retrieval, outperforming the previous leading model, Voyage-Code, by over 20% on CoIR benchmark. In addition to excelling in code retrieval, our models demonstrate competitive performance on the widely adopted BeIR text retrieval benchmark, offering versatility across domains. Experimental results demonstrate that improving retrieval performance significantly enhances end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) performance for code-related tasks.

This paper introduces Opus, a novel framework for generating and optimizing Workflows tailored to complex Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) use cases, focusing on cost reduction and quality enhancement while adhering to established industry processes and operational constraints. Our approach generates executable Workflows from Intention, defined as the alignment of Client Input, Client Output, and Process Context. These Workflows are represented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), with nodes as Tasks consisting of sequences of executable Instructions, including tools and human expert reviews. We adopt a two-phase methodology: Workflow Generation and Workflow Optimization. In the Generation phase, Workflows are generated using a Large Work Model (LWM) informed by a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) that encodes domain-specific procedural and operational knowledge. In the Optimization phase, Workflows are transformed into Workflow Graphs (WFGs), where optimal Workflows are determined through path optimization. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) face challenges in reliably retrieving detailed process data as well as generating industry-compliant workflows. The key contributions of this paper include: - The integration of a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) into a Large Work Model (LWM), enabling the generation of context-aware, semantically aligned, structured and auditable Workflows. - A two-phase approach that combines Workflow Generation from Intention with graph-based Workflow Optimization. - Opus Alpha 1 Large and Opus Alpha 1 Small, models that outperform state-of-the-art LLMs by 38\% and 29\% respectively in Workflow Generation for a Medical Coding use case.

Image captioning models are widely used to describe recent and archived pictures with the objective of improving their accessibility and retrieval. Yet, these approaches tend to be inefficient and biased at retrieving people's names. In this work we introduce AstroCaptions, a dataset for the image captioning task. This dataset specifically contains thousands of public fig-ures that are complex to identify for a traditional model. We also propose a novel post-processing method to insert identified people's names inside the caption using explainable AI tools and the grounding capabilities of vi-sion-language models. The results obtained with this method show signifi-cant improvements of captions quality and a potential of reducing halluci-nations. Up to 93.2% of the persons detected can be inserted in the image captions leading to improvements in the BLEU, ROUGE, CIDEr and METEOR scores of each captioning model.

Equipped with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning ability in various downstream tasks. Even so, suffering from hallucinations and the inability to access external knowledge, LLMs often come with incorrect or unfaithful intermediate reasoning steps, especially in the context of answering knowledge-intensive tasks such as KBQA. To alleviate this issue, we propose a framework called Knowledge-Driven Chain-of-Thought (KD-CoT) to verify and modify reasoning traces in CoT via interaction with external knowledge, and thus overcome the hallucinations and error propagation. Concretely, we formulate the CoT rationale process of LLMs into a structured multi-round QA format. In each round, LLMs interact with a QA system that retrieves external knowledge and produce faithful reasoning traces based on retrieved precise answers. The structured CoT reasoning of LLMs is facilitated by our developed KBQA CoT collection, which serves as in-context learning demonstrations and can also be utilized as feedback augmentation to train a robust retriever. Extensive experiments on WebQSP and ComplexWebQuestion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed KD-CoT in task-solving reasoning generation, which outperforms the vanilla CoT ICL with an absolute success rate of 8.0% and 5.1%. Furthermore, our proposed feedback-augmented retriever outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines for retrieving knowledge, achieving significant improvement in Hit performance.

CLIP has shown impressive results in aligning images and texts at scale. However, its ability to capture detailed visual features remains limited because CLIP matches images and texts at a global level. To address this issue, we propose FLAIR, Fine-grained Language-informed Image Representations, an approach that utilizes long and detailed image descriptions to learn localized image embeddings. By sampling diverse sub-captions that describe fine-grained details about an image, we train our vision-language model to produce not only global embeddings but also text-specific image representations. Our model introduces text-conditioned attention pooling on top of local image tokens to produce fine-grained image representations that excel at retrieving detailed image content. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on both, existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks, as well as, our newly introduced fine-grained retrieval task which evaluates vision-language models' ability to retrieve partial image content. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FLAIR trained on 30M image-text pairs in capturing fine-grained visual information, including zero-shot semantic segmentation, outperforming models trained on billions of pairs. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/flair .

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with external data have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in completing real-world tasks. Techniques for integrating external data into LLMs, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning, are gaining increasing attention and widespread application. Nonetheless, the effective deployment of data-augmented LLMs across various specialized fields presents substantial challenges. These challenges encompass a wide range of issues, from retrieving relevant data and accurately interpreting user intent to fully harnessing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs for complex tasks. We believe that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for data-augmented LLM applications. In practice, underperformance often arises from a failure to correctly identify the core focus of a task or because the task inherently requires a blend of multiple capabilities that must be disentangled for better resolution. In this survey, we propose a RAG task categorization method, classifying user queries into four levels based on the type of external data required and primary focus of the task: explicit fact queries, implicit fact queries, interpretable rationale queries, and hidden rationale queries. We define these levels of queries, provide relevant datasets, and summarize the key challenges and most effective techniques for addressing these challenges. Finally, we discuss three main forms of integrating external data into LLMs: context, small model, and fine-tuning, highlighting their respective strengths, limitations, and the types of problems they are suited to solve. This work aims to help readers thoroughly understand and decompose the data requirements and key bottlenecks in building LLM applications, offering solutions to the different challenges and serving as a guide to systematically developing such applications.

People often capture memories through photos, screenshots, and videos. While existing AI-based tools enable querying this data using natural language, they mostly only support retrieving individual pieces of information like certain objects in photos and struggle with answering more complex queries that involve interpreting interconnected memories like event sequences. We conducted a one-month diary study to collect realistic user queries and generated a taxonomy of necessary contextual information for integrating with captured memories. We then introduce OmniQuery, a novel system that is able to answer complex personal memory-related questions that require extracting and inferring contextual information. OmniQuery augments single captured memories through integrating scattered contextual information from multiple interconnected memories, retrieves relevant memories, and uses a large language model (LLM) to comprehensive answers. In human evaluations, we show the effectiveness of OmniQuery with an accuracy of 71.5%, and it outperformed a conventional RAG system, winning or tying in 74.5% of the time.

Human demonstrations as prompts are a powerful way to program robots to do long-horizon manipulation tasks. However, translating these demonstrations into robot-executable actions presents significant challenges due to execution mismatches in movement styles and physical capabilities. Existing methods either depend on human-robot paired data, which is infeasible to scale, or rely heavily on frame-level visual similarities that often break down in practice. To address these challenges, we propose RHyME, a novel framework that automatically aligns human and robot task executions using optimal transport costs. Given long-horizon robot demonstrations, RHyME synthesizes semantically equivalent human videos by retrieving and composing short-horizon human clips. This approach facilitates effective policy training without the need for paired data. RHyME successfully imitates a range of cross-embodiment demonstrators, both in simulation and with a real human hand, achieving over 50\% increase in task success compared to previous methods. We release our code and datasets at https://portal-cornell.github.io/rhyme/.

In-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising avenue of research in Dialog State Tracking (DST). However, the best-performing in-context learning methods involve retrieving and adding similar examples to the prompt, requiring access to labeled training data. Procuring such training data for a wide range of domains and applications is time-consuming, expensive, and, at times, infeasible. While zero-shot learning requires no training data, it significantly lags behind the few-shot setup. Thus, `Can we efficiently generate synthetic data for any dialogue schema to enable few-shot prompting?' Addressing this question, we propose \method, a data generation framework tailored for DST, utilizing LLMs. Our approach only requires the dialogue schema and a few hand-crafted dialogue templates to synthesize natural, coherent, and free-flowing dialogues with DST annotations. Few-shot learning using data from {\method} results in 4-5% improvement in Joint Goal Accuracy over the zero-shot baseline on MultiWOZ 2.1 and 2.4. Remarkably, our few-shot learning approach recovers nearly 98% of the performance compared to the few-shot setup using human-annotated training data. Our synthetic data and code can be accessed at https://github.com/apple/ml-synthdst

We introduce sub-sentence encoder, a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. In contrast to the standard practice with sentence embeddings, where the meaning of an entire sequence of text is encoded into a fixed-length vector, the sub-sentence encoder learns to produce distinct contextual embeddings corresponding to different atomic propositions, i.e. atomic units of meaning expressed within a text sequence. The sub-sentence embeddings are contrastively learned to recognize (inferred) semantic equivalence between propositions across different text sequences. Our experiments show the effectiveness of sub-sentence encoders in applications, such as retrieving supporting facts for fine-grained text attribution or recognizing the conditional semantic similarity between texts. In practice, we demonstrate that sub-sentence encoders keep the same level of inference cost and space complexity compared to sentence encoders.

Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have led to the emergence of powerful models such as Small LMs (e.g., T5) and Large LMs (e.g., GPT-4). These models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across a wide range of tasks, such as name entity recognition (NER) in the general domain. (We define SLMs as pre-trained models with fewer parameters compared to models like GPT-3/3.5/4, such as T5, BERT, and others.) Nevertheless, their efficacy in the medical section remains uncertain and the performance of medical NER always needs high accuracy because of the particularity of the field. This paper aims to provide a thorough investigation to compare the performance of LMs in medical few-shot NER and answer How far is LMs from 100\% Few-shot NER in Medical Domain, and moreover to explore an effective entity recognizer to help improve the NER performance. Based on our extensive experiments conducted on 16 NER models spanning from 2018 to 2023, our findings clearly indicate that LLMs outperform SLMs in few-shot medical NER tasks, given the presence of suitable examples and appropriate logical frameworks. Despite the overall superiority of LLMs in few-shot medical NER tasks, it is important to note that they still encounter some challenges, such as misidentification, wrong template prediction, etc. Building on previous findings, we introduce a simple and effective method called RT (Retrieving and Thinking), which serves as retrievers, finding relevant examples, and as thinkers, employing a step-by-step reasoning process. Experimental results show that our proposed RT framework significantly outperforms the strong open baselines on the two open medical benchmark datasets

We propose a new paradigm to help Large Language Models (LLMs) generate more accurate factual knowledge without retrieving from an external corpus, called RECITation-augmented gEneration (RECITE). Different from retrieval-augmented language models that retrieve relevant documents before generating the outputs, given an input, RECITE first recites one or several relevant passages from LLMs' own memory via sampling, and then produces the final answers. We show that RECITE is a powerful paradigm for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. Specifically, we show that by utilizing recitation as the intermediate step, a recite-and-answer scheme can achieve new state-of-the-art performance in various closed-book question answering (CBQA) tasks. In experiments, we verify the effectiveness of \method~on four pre-trained models (PaLM, UL2, OPT, and Codex) and three CBQA tasks (Natural Questions, TriviaQA, and HotpotQA). Our code is available at "https://github.com/Edward-Sun/RECITE".

Retrieval augmented language models have recently become the standard for knowledge intensive tasks. Rather than relying purely on latent semantics within the parameters of large neural models, these methods enlist a semi-parametric memory to encode an index of knowledge for the model to retrieve over. Most prior work has employed text passages as the unit of knowledge, which has high coverage at the cost of interpretability, controllability, and efficiency. The opposite properties arise in other methods which have instead relied on knowledge base (KB) facts. At the same time, more recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of storing and retrieving from an index of Q-A pairs derived from text lewis2021paq. This approach yields a high coverage knowledge representation that maintains KB-like properties due to its representations being more atomic units of information. In this work we push this line of research further by proposing a question-answer augmented encoder-decoder model and accompanying pretraining strategy. This yields an end-to-end system that not only outperforms prior QA retrieval methods on single-hop QA tasks but also enables compositional reasoning, as demonstrated by strong performance on two multi-hop QA datasets. Together, these methods improve the ability to interpret and control the model while narrowing the performance gap with passage retrieval systems.

Recently, information retrieval has seen the emergence of dense retrievers, using neural networks, as an alternative to classical sparse methods based on term-frequency. These models have obtained state-of-the-art results on datasets and tasks where large training sets are available. However, they do not transfer well to new applications with no training data, and are outperformed by unsupervised term-frequency methods such as BM25. In this work, we explore the limits of contrastive learning as a way to train unsupervised dense retrievers and show that it leads to strong performance in various retrieval settings. On the BEIR benchmark our unsupervised model outperforms BM25 on 11 out of 15 datasets for the Recall@100. When used as pre-training before fine-tuning, either on a few thousands in-domain examples or on the large MS~MARCO dataset, our contrastive model leads to improvements on the BEIR benchmark. Finally, we evaluate our approach for multi-lingual retrieval, where training data is even scarcer than for English, and show that our approach leads to strong unsupervised performance. Our model also exhibits strong cross-lingual transfer when fine-tuned on supervised English data only and evaluated on low resources language such as Swahili. We show that our unsupervised models can perform cross-lingual retrieval between different scripts, such as retrieving English documents from Arabic queries, which would not be possible with term matching methods.

Equipping large language models (LLMs) with latent-space memory has attracted increasing attention as they can extend the context window of existing language models. However, retaining information from the distant past remains a challenge. For example, MemoryLLM (Wang et al., 2024a), as a representative work with latent-space memory, compresses past information into hidden states across all layers, forming a memory pool of 1B parameters. While effective for sequence lengths up to 16k tokens, it struggles to retain knowledge beyond 20k tokens. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing M+, a memory-augmented model based on MemoryLLM that significantly enhances long-term information retention. M+ integrates a long-term memory mechanism with a co-trained retriever, dynamically retrieving relevant information during text generation. We evaluate M+ on diverse benchmarks, including long-context understanding and knowledge retention tasks. Experimental results show that M+ significantly outperforms MemoryLLM and recent strong baselines, extending knowledge retention from under 20k to over 160k tokens with similar GPU memory overhead.

As working with large datasets becomes standard, the task of accurately retrieving images containing objects of interest by an open set textual query gains practical importance. The current leading approach utilizes a pre-trained CLIP model without any adaptation to the target domain, balancing accuracy and efficiency through additional post-processing. In this work, we propose FOR: Finetuning for Object-centric Open-vocabulary Image Retrieval, which allows finetuning on a target dataset using closed-set labels while keeping the visual-language association crucial for open vocabulary retrieval. FOR is based on two design elements: a specialized decoder variant of the CLIP head customized for the intended task, and its coupling within a multi-objective training framework. Together, these design choices result in a significant increase in accuracy, showcasing improvements of up to 8 mAP@50 points over SoTA across three datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate that FOR is also effective in a semi-supervised setting, achieving impressive results even when only a small portion of the dataset is labeled.

Code generation with large language models has shown significant promise, especially when employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with few-shot examples. However, selecting effective examples that enhance generation quality remains a challenging task, particularly when the target programming language (PL) is underrepresented. In this study, we present two key findings: (1) retrieving examples whose presented algorithmic plans can be referenced for generating the desired behavior significantly improves generation accuracy, and (2) converting code into pseudocode effectively captures such algorithmic plans, enhancing retrieval quality even when the source and the target PLs are different. Based on these findings, we propose Plan-as-query Example Retrieval for few-shot prompting in Code generation (PERC), a novel framework that utilizes algorithmic plans to identify and retrieve effective examples. We validate the effectiveness of PERC through extensive experiments on the CodeContests, HumanEval and MultiPL-E benchmarks: PERC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art RAG methods in code generation, both when the source and target programming languages match or differ, highlighting its adaptability and robustness in diverse coding environments.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework has shown promising potential in knowledge-intensive question answering (QA) by retrieving external corpus and generating based on augmented context. However, existing approaches only consider the query itself, neither specifying the retrieval preferences for the retrievers nor informing the generators of how to refer to the retrieved documents for the answers, which poses a significant challenge to the QA performance. To address these issues, we propose Rule-Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation with LMs, which explicitly introduces symbolic rules as demonstrations for in-context learning (RuleRAG-ICL) to guide retrievers to retrieve logically related documents in the directions of rules and uniformly guide generators to generate answers attributed by the guidance of the same set of rules. Moreover, the combination of queries and rules can be further used as supervised fine-tuning data to update retrievers and generators (RuleRAG-FT) to achieve better rule-based instruction following capability, leading to retrieve more supportive results and generate more acceptable answers. To emphasize the attribution of rules, we construct five rule-aware QA benchmarks, including three temporal and two static scenarios, and equip RuleRAG with several kinds of retrievers and generators. Experiments demonstrate that training-free RuleRAG-ICL effectively improves the retrieval quality of +89.2% in Recall@10 scores and generation accuracy of +103.1% in exact match scores over standard RAG on average across the five benchmarks, and further fine-tuned RuleRAG-FT consistently yields more significant performance enhancement. Extensive analyses indicate that RuleRAG scales well with increasing numbers of retrieved documents and exhibits generalization ability for untrained rules.

Addressing the challenge of effectively processing long contexts has become a critical issue for Large Language Models (LLMs). Two common strategies have emerged: 1) reducing the input length, such as retrieving relevant chunks by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and 2) expanding the context window limit of LLMs. However, both strategies have drawbacks: input reduction has no guarantee of covering the part with needed information, while window extension struggles with focusing on the pertinent information for solving the task. To mitigate these limitations, we propose Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel framework that harnesses multi-agent collaboration through natural language to enable information aggregation and context reasoning across various LLMs over long-context tasks. CoA consists of multiple worker agents who sequentially communicate to handle different segmented portions of the text, followed by a manager agent who synthesizes these contributions into a coherent final output. CoA processes the entire input by interleaving reading and reasoning, and it mitigates long context focus issues by assigning each agent a short context. We perform comprehensive evaluation of CoA on a wide range of long-context tasks in question answering, summarization, and code completion, demonstrating significant improvements by up to 10% over strong baselines of RAG, Full-Context, and multi-agent LLMs.

Sleep is a complex physiological process evaluated through various modalities recording electrical brain, cardiac, and respiratory activities. We curate a large polysomnography dataset from over 14,000 participants comprising over 100,000 hours of multi-modal sleep recordings. Leveraging this extensive dataset, we developed SleepFM, the first multi-modal foundation model for sleep analysis. We show that a novel leave-one-out approach for contrastive learning significantly improves downstream task performance compared to representations from standard pairwise contrastive learning. A logistic regression model trained on SleepFM's learned embeddings outperforms an end-to-end trained convolutional neural network (CNN) on sleep stage classification (macro AUROC 0.88 vs 0.72 and macro AUPRC 0.72 vs 0.48) and sleep disordered breathing detection (AUROC 0.85 vs 0.69 and AUPRC 0.77 vs 0.61). Notably, the learned embeddings achieve 48% top-1 average accuracy in retrieving the corresponding recording clips of other modalities from 90,000 candidates. This work demonstrates the value of holistic multi-modal sleep modeling to fully capture the richness of sleep recordings. SleepFM is open source and available at https://github.com/rthapa84/sleepfm-codebase.

In this paper, we demonstrate how Large Language Models (LLMs) can effectively learn to use an off-the-shelf information retrieval (IR) system specifically when additional context is required to answer a given question. Given the performance of IR systems, the optimal strategy for question answering does not always entail external information retrieval; rather, it often involves leveraging the parametric memory of the LLM itself. Prior research has identified this phenomenon in the PopQA dataset, wherein the most popular questions are effectively addressed using the LLM's parametric memory, while less popular ones require IR system usage. Following this, we propose a tailored training approach for LLMs, leveraging existing open-domain question answering datasets. Here, LLMs are trained to generate a special token, <RET>, when they do not know the answer to a question. Our evaluation of the Adaptive Retrieval LLM (Adapt-LLM) on the PopQA dataset showcases improvements over the same LLM under three configurations: (i) retrieving information for all the questions, (ii) using always the parametric memory of the LLM, and (iii) using a popularity threshold to decide when to use a retriever. Through our analysis, we demonstrate that Adapt-LLM is able to generate the <RET> token when it determines that it does not know how to answer a question, indicating the need for IR, while it achieves notably high accuracy levels when it chooses to rely only on its parametric memory.

This paper introduces BLaIR, a series of pretrained sentence embedding models specialized for recommendation scenarios. BLaIR is trained to learn correlations between item metadata and potential natural language context, which is useful for retrieving and recommending items. To pretrain BLaIR, we collect Amazon Reviews 2023, a new dataset comprising over 570 million reviews and 48 million items from 33 categories, significantly expanding beyond the scope of previous versions. We evaluate the generalization ability of BLaIR across multiple domains and tasks, including a new task named complex product search, referring to retrieving relevant items given long, complex natural language contexts. Leveraging large language models like ChatGPT, we correspondingly construct a semi-synthetic evaluation set, Amazon-C4. Empirical results on the new task, as well as conventional retrieval and recommendation tasks, demonstrate that BLaIR exhibit strong text and item representation capacity. Our datasets, code, and checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/hyp1231/AmazonReviews2023.

Adaptive retrieval-augmented generation (ARAG) aims to dynamically determine the necessity of retrieval for queries instead of retrieving indiscriminately to enhance the efficiency and relevance of the sourced information. However, previous works largely overlook the evaluation of ARAG approaches, leading to their effectiveness being understudied. This work presents a benchmark, RetrievalQA, comprising 1,271 short-form questions covering new world and long-tail knowledge. The knowledge necessary to answer the questions is absent from LLMs; therefore, external information must be retrieved to answer correctly. This makes RetrievalQA a suitable testbed to evaluate existing ARAG methods. We observe that calibration-based methods heavily rely on threshold tuning, while vanilla prompting is inadequate for guiding LLMs to make reliable retrieval decisions. Based on our findings, we propose Time-Aware Adaptive Retrieval (TA-ARE), a simple yet effective method that helps LLMs assess the necessity of retrieval without calibration or additional training. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/hyintell/RetrievalQA

Retrieval augmentation has become an effective solution to empower large language models (LLMs) with external and verified knowledge sources from the database, which overcomes the limitations and hallucinations of LLMs in handling up-to-date and domain-specific information. However, existing embedding models for text retrieval usually have three non-negligible limitations. First, the number and diversity of samples in a batch are too restricted to supervise the modeling of textual nuances at scale. Second, the high proportional noise are detrimental to the semantic correctness and consistency of embeddings. Third, the equal treatment to easy and difficult samples would cause sub-optimum convergence of embeddings with poorer generalization. In this paper, we propose the PEG, a progressively learned embeddings for robust text retrieval. Specifically, we increase the training in-batch negative samples to 80,000, and for each query, we extracted five hard negatives. Concurrently, we incorporated a progressive learning mechanism, enabling the model to dynamically modulate its attention to the samples throughout the entire training process. Additionally, PEG is trained on more than 100 million data, encompassing a wide range of domains (e.g., finance, medicine, and tourism) and covering various tasks (e.g., question-answering, machine reading comprehension, and similarity matching). Extensive experiments conducted on C-MTEB and DuReader demonstrate that PEG surpasses state-of-the-art embeddings in retrieving true positives, highlighting its significant potential for applications in LLMs. Our model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/TownsWu/PEG.

We introduce Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding (REST), a novel algorithm designed to speed up language model generation. The key insight driving the development of REST is the observation that the process of text generation often includes certain common phases and patterns. Unlike previous methods that rely on a draft language model for speculative decoding, REST harnesses the power of retrieval to generate draft tokens. This method draws from the reservoir of existing knowledge, retrieving and employing relevant tokens based on the current context. Its plug-and-play nature allows for seamless integration and acceleration of any language models, all without necessitating additional training. When benchmarked on 7B and 13B language models in a single-batch setting, REST achieves a significant speedup of 1.62X to 2.36X on code or text generation. The code of REST is available at https://github.com/FasterDecoding/REST.

Climate models have been key for assessing the impact of climate change and simulating future climate scenarios. The machine learning (ML) community has taken an increased interest in supporting climate scientists' efforts on various tasks such as climate model emulation, downscaling, and prediction tasks. Many of those tasks have been addressed on datasets created with single climate models. However, both the climate science and ML communities have suggested that to address those tasks at scale, we need large, consistent, and ML-ready climate model datasets. Here, we introduce ClimateSet, a dataset containing the inputs and outputs of 36 climate models from the Input4MIPs and CMIP6 archives. In addition, we provide a modular dataset pipeline for retrieving and preprocessing additional climate models and scenarios. We showcase the potential of our dataset by using it as a benchmark for ML-based climate model emulation. We gain new insights about the performance and generalization capabilities of the different ML models by analyzing their performance across different climate models. Furthermore, the dataset can be used to train an ML emulator on several climate models instead of just one. Such a "super emulator" can quickly project new climate change scenarios, complementing existing scenarios already provided to policymakers. We believe ClimateSet will create the basis needed for the ML community to tackle climate-related tasks at scale.

To detect the deployment of large language models for malicious use cases (e.g., fake content creation or academic plagiarism), several approaches have recently been proposed for identifying AI-generated text via watermarks or statistical irregularities. How robust are these detection algorithms to paraphrases of AI-generated text? To stress test these detectors, we first train an 11B parameter paraphrase generation model (DIPPER) that can paraphrase paragraphs, optionally leveraging surrounding text (e.g., user-written prompts) as context. DIPPER also uses scalar knobs to control the amount of lexical diversity and reordering in the paraphrases. Paraphrasing text generated by three large language models (including GPT3.5-davinci-003) with DIPPER successfully evades several detectors, including watermarking, GPTZero, DetectGPT, and OpenAI's text classifier. For example, DIPPER drops the detection accuracy of DetectGPT from 70.3% to 4.6% (at a constant false positive rate of 1%), without appreciably modifying the input semantics. To increase the robustness of AI-generated text detection to paraphrase attacks, we introduce a simple defense that relies on retrieving semantically-similar generations and must be maintained by a language model API provider. Given a candidate text, our algorithm searches a database of sequences previously generated by the API, looking for sequences that match the candidate text within a certain threshold. We empirically verify our defense using a database of 15M generations from a fine-tuned T5-XXL model and find that it can detect 80% to 97% of paraphrased generations across different settings, while only classifying 1% of human-written sequences as AI-generated. We will open source our code, model and data for future research.

As digital music production has become mainstream, the selection of appropriate virtual instruments plays a crucial role in determining the quality of music. To search the musical instrument samples or virtual instruments that make one's desired sound, music producers use their ears to listen and compare each instrument sample in their collection, which is time-consuming and inefficient. In this paper, we call this task as Musical Instrument Retrieval and propose a method for retrieving desired musical instruments using reference music mixture as a query. The proposed model consists of the Single-Instrument Encoder and the Multi-Instrument Encoder, both based on convolutional neural networks. The Single-Instrument Encoder is trained to classify the instruments used in single-track audio, and we take its penultimate layer's activation as the instrument embedding. The Multi-Instrument Encoder is trained to estimate multiple instrument embeddings using the instrument embeddings computed by the Single-Instrument Encoder as a set of target embeddings. For more generalized training and realistic evaluation, we also propose a new dataset called Nlakh. Experimental results showed that the Single-Instrument Encoder was able to learn the mapping from the audio signal of unseen instruments to the instrument embedding space and the Multi-Instrument Encoder was able to extract multiple embeddings from the mixture of music and retrieve the desired instruments successfully. The code used for the experiment and audio samples are available at: https://github.com/minju0821/musical_instrument_retrieval

Context: Recent research indicates that Web queries written by software developers are not very successful in retrieving relevant results, performing measurably worse compared to general purpose Web queries. Most approaches up to this point have addressed this problem with software engineering-specific automated query reformulation techniques, which work without developer involvement but are limited by the content of the original query. In other words, these techniques automatically improve the existing query but can not contribute new, previously unmentioned, concepts. Objective: In this paper, we propose a technique to guide software developers in manually improving their own Web search queries. We examine a conversational approach that follows unsuccessful queries with a clarification question aimed at eliciting additional query terms, thus providing to the developer a clear dimension along which the query could be improved. Methods: We describe a set of clarification questions derived from a corpus of software developer queries and a neural approach to recommending them for a newly issued query. Results: Our evaluation indicates that the recommendation technique is accurate, predicting a valid clarification question 80% of the time and outperforms simple baselines, as well as, state-of-the-art Learning To Rank (LTR) baselines. Conclusion: As shown in the experimental results, the described approach is capable at recommending appropriate clarification questions to software developers and considered useful by a sample of developers ranging from novices to experienced professionals.

In-context learning is a recent paradigm in natural language understanding, where a large pre-trained language model (LM) observes a test instance and a few training examples as its input, and directly decodes the output without any update to its parameters. However, performance has been shown to strongly depend on the selected training examples (termed prompt). In this work, we propose an efficient method for retrieving prompts for in-context learning using annotated data and a LM. Given an input-output pair, we estimate the probability of the output given the input and a candidate training example as the prompt, and label training examples as positive or negative based on this probability. We then train an efficient dense retriever from this data, which is used to retrieve training examples as prompts at test time. We evaluate our approach on three sequence-to-sequence tasks where language utterances are mapped to meaning representations, and find that it substantially outperforms prior work and multiple baselines across the board.

The in-memory algorithms for approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) have achieved great success for fast high-recall search, but are extremely expensive when handling very large scale database. Thus, there is an increasing request for the hybrid ANNS solutions with small memory and inexpensive solid-state drive (SSD). In this paper, we present a simple but efficient memory-disk hybrid indexing and search system, named SPANN, that follows the inverted index methodology. It stores the centroid points of the posting lists in the memory and the large posting lists in the disk. We guarantee both disk-access efficiency (low latency) and high recall by effectively reducing the disk-access number and retrieving high-quality posting lists. In the index-building stage, we adopt a hierarchical balanced clustering algorithm to balance the length of posting lists and augment the posting list by adding the points in the closure of the corresponding clusters. In the search stage, we use a query-aware scheme to dynamically prune the access of unnecessary posting lists. Experiment results demonstrate that SPANN is 2times faster than the state-of-the-art ANNS solution DiskANN to reach the same recall quality 90% with same memory cost in three billion-scale datasets. It can reach 90% recall@1 and recall@10 in just around one millisecond with only 32GB memory cost. Code is available at: {\footnotesizeblue{https://github.com/microsoft/SPTAG}}.

In this work, we focus on the problem of retrieving relevant arguments for a query claim covering diverse aspects. State-of-the-art methods rely on explicit mappings between claims and premises, and thus are unable to utilize large available collections of premises without laborious and costly manual annotation. Their diversity approach relies on removing duplicates via clustering which does not directly ensure that the selected premises cover all aspects. This work introduces a new multi-step approach for the argument retrieval problem. Rather than relying on ground-truth assignments, our approach employs a machine learning model to capture semantic relationships between arguments. Beyond that, it aims to cover diverse facets of the query, instead of trying to identify duplicates explicitly. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach leads to a significant improvement in the argument retrieval task even though it requires less data.

Generative models for open domain question answering have proven to be competitive, without resorting to external knowledge. While promising, this approach requires to use models with billions of parameters, which are expensive to train and query. In this paper, we investigate how much these models can benefit from retrieving text passages, potentially containing evidence. We obtain state-of-the-art results on the Natural Questions and TriviaQA open benchmarks. Interestingly, we observe that the performance of this method significantly improves when increasing the number of retrieved passages. This is evidence that generative models are good at aggregating and combining evidence from multiple passages.

We introduce MARGE, a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model learned with an unsupervised multi-lingual multi-document paraphrasing objective. MARGE provides an alternative to the dominant masked language modeling paradigm, where we self-supervise the reconstruction of target text by retrieving a set of related texts (in many languages) and conditioning on them to maximize the likelihood of generating the original. We show it is possible to jointly learn to do retrieval and reconstruction, given only a random initialization. The objective noisily captures aspects of paraphrase, translation, multi-document summarization, and information retrieval, allowing for strong zero-shot performance on several tasks. For example, with no additional task-specific training we achieve BLEU scores of up to 35.8 for document translation. We further show that fine-tuning gives strong performance on a range of discriminative and generative tasks in many languages, making MARGE the most generally applicable pre-training method to date.

Recently, neural networks have been widely used in e-commerce recommender systems, owing to the rapid development of deep learning. We formalize the recommender system as a sequential recommendation problem, intending to predict the next items that the user might be interacted with. Recent works usually give an overall embedding from a user's behavior sequence. However, a unified user embedding cannot reflect the user's multiple interests during a period. In this paper, we propose a novel controllable multi-interest framework for the sequential recommendation, called ComiRec. Our multi-interest module captures multiple interests from user behavior sequences, which can be exploited for retrieving candidate items from the large-scale item pool. These items are then fed into an aggregation module to obtain the overall recommendation. The aggregation module leverages a controllable factor to balance the recommendation accuracy and diversity. We conduct experiments for the sequential recommendation on two real-world datasets, Amazon and Taobao. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models. Our framework has also been successfully deployed on the offline Alibaba distributed cloud platform.

Conversational AI assistants are becoming popular and question-answering is an important part of any conversational assistant. Using relevant utterances as features in question-answering has shown to improve both the precision and recall for retrieving the right answer by a conversational assistant. Hence, utterance generation has become an important problem with the goal of generating relevant utterances (sentences or phrases) from a knowledge base article that consists of a title and a description. However, generating good utterances usually requires a lot of manual effort, creating the need for an automated utterance generation. In this paper, we propose an utterance generation system which 1) uses extractive summarization to extract important sentences from the description, 2) uses multiple paraphrasing techniques to generate a diverse set of paraphrases of the title and summary sentences, and 3) selects good candidate paraphrases with the help of a novel candidate selection algorithm.

Composing knowledge from multiple pieces of texts is a key challenge in multi-hop question answering. We present a multi-hop reasoning dataset, Question Answering via Sentence Composition(QASC), that requires retrieving facts from a large corpus and composing them to answer a multiple-choice question. QASC is the first dataset to offer two desirable properties: (a) the facts to be composed are annotated in a large corpus, and (b) the decomposition into these facts is not evident from the question itself. The latter makes retrieval challenging as the system must introduce new concepts or relations in order to discover potential decompositions. Further, the reasoning model must then learn to identify valid compositions of these retrieved facts using common-sense reasoning. To help address these challenges, we provide annotation for supporting facts as well as their composition. Guided by these annotations, we present a two-step approach to mitigate the retrieval challenges. We use other multiple-choice datasets as additional training data to strengthen the reasoning model. Our proposed approach improves over current state-of-the-art language models by 11% (absolute). The reasoning and retrieval problems, however, remain unsolved as this model still lags by 20% behind human performance.

It is challenging for current one-step retrieve-and-read question answering (QA) systems to answer questions like "Which novel by the author of 'Armada' will be adapted as a feature film by Steven Spielberg?" because the question seldom contains retrievable clues about the missing entity (here, the author). Answering such a question requires multi-hop reasoning where one must gather information about the missing entity (or facts) to proceed with further reasoning. We present GoldEn (Gold Entity) Retriever, which iterates between reading context and retrieving more supporting documents to answer open-domain multi-hop questions. Instead of using opaque and computationally expensive neural retrieval models, GoldEn Retriever generates natural language search queries given the question and available context, and leverages off-the-shelf information retrieval systems to query for missing entities. This allows GoldEn Retriever to scale up efficiently for open-domain multi-hop reasoning while maintaining interpretability. We evaluate GoldEn Retriever on the recently proposed open-domain multi-hop QA dataset, HotpotQA, and demonstrate that it outperforms the best previously published model despite not using pretrained language models such as BERT.

The continually increasing number of documents produced each year necessitates ever improving information processing methods for searching, retrieving, and organizing text. Central to these information processing methods is document classification, which has become an important application for supervised learning. Recently the performance of these traditional classifiers has degraded as the number of documents has increased. This is because along with this growth in the number of documents has come an increase in the number of categories. This paper approaches this problem differently from current document classification methods that view the problem as multi-class classification. Instead we perform hierarchical classification using an approach we call Hierarchical Deep Learning for Text classification (HDLTex). HDLTex employs stacks of deep learning architectures to provide specialized understanding at each level of the document hierarchy.

Documents are visually rich structures that convey information through text, as well as tables, figures, page layouts, or fonts. While modern document retrieval systems exhibit strong performance on query-to-text matching, they struggle to exploit visual cues efficiently, hindering their performance on practical document retrieval applications such as Retrieval Augmented Generation. To benchmark current systems on visually rich document retrieval, we introduce the Visual Document Retrieval Benchmark ViDoRe, composed of various page-level retrieving tasks spanning multiple domains, languages, and settings. The inherent shortcomings of modern systems motivate the introduction of a new retrieval model architecture, ColPali, which leverages the document understanding capabilities of recent Vision Language Models to produce high-quality contextualized embeddings solely from images of document pages. Combined with a late interaction matching mechanism, ColPali largely outperforms modern document retrieval pipelines while being drastically faster and end-to-end trainable.

Stock movement prediction, a fundamental task in financial time-series forecasting, requires identifying and retrieving critical influencing factors from vast amounts of time-series data. However, existing text-trained or numeric similarity-based retrieval methods fall short in handling complex financial analysis. To address this, we propose the first retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for financial time-series forecasting, featuring three key innovations: a fine-tuned 1B parameter large language model (StockLLM) as the backbone, a novel candidate selection method leveraging LLM feedback, and a training objective that maximizes similarity between queries and historically significant sequences. This enables our retriever, FinSeer, to uncover meaningful patterns while minimizing noise in complex financial data. We also construct new datasets integrating financial indicators and historical stock prices to train FinSeer and ensure robust evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that our RAG framework outperforms bare StockLLM and random retrieval, highlighting its effectiveness, while FinSeer surpasses existing retrieval methods, achieving an 8\% higher accuracy on BIGDATA22 and retrieving more impactful sequences. This work underscores the importance of tailored retrieval models in financial forecasting and provides a novel framework for future research.

Language agents perform complex tasks by using tools to execute each step precisely. However, most existing agents are based on proprietary models or designed to target specific tasks, such as mathematics or multi-hop question answering. We introduce Husky, a holistic, open-source language agent that learns to reason over a unified action space to address a diverse set of complex tasks involving numerical, tabular, and knowledge-based reasoning. Husky iterates between two stages: 1) generating the next action to take towards solving a given task and 2) executing the action using expert models and updating the current solution state. We identify a thorough ontology of actions for addressing complex tasks and curate high-quality data to train expert models for executing these actions. Our experiments show that Husky outperforms prior language agents across 14 evaluation datasets. Moreover, we introduce HuskyQA, a new evaluation set which stress tests language agents for mixed-tool reasoning, with a focus on retrieving missing knowledge and performing numerical reasoning. Despite using 7B models, Husky matches or even exceeds frontier LMs such as GPT-4 on these tasks, showcasing the efficacy of our holistic approach in addressing complex reasoning problems. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/agent-husky/Husky-v1.

Transformers are the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, but there is growing interest in models that use a fixed-size latent state that does not depend on the sequence length, which we refer to as "generalized state space models" (GSSMs). In this paper we show that while GSSMs are promising in terms of inference-time efficiency, they are limited compared to transformer models on tasks that require copying from the input context. We start with a theoretical analysis of the simple task of string copying and prove that a two layer transformer can copy strings of exponential length while GSSMs are fundamentally limited by their fixed-size latent state. Empirically, we find that transformers outperform GSSMs in terms of efficiency and generalization on synthetic tasks that require copying the context. Finally, we evaluate pretrained large language models and find that transformer models dramatically outperform state space models at copying and retrieving information from context. Taken together, these results suggest a fundamental gap between transformers and GSSMs on tasks of practical interest.

Recent large language models (LLMs) support long contexts ranging from 128K to 1M tokens. A popular method for evaluating these capabilities is the needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) test, which involves retrieving a "needle" (relevant information) from a "haystack" (long irrelevant context). Extensions of this approach include increasing distractors, fact chaining, and in-context reasoning. However, in these benchmarks, models can exploit existing literal matches between the needle and haystack to simplify the task. To address this, we introduce NoLiMa, a benchmark extending NIAH with a carefully designed needle set, where questions and needles have minimal lexical overlap, requiring models to infer latent associations to locate the needle within the haystack. We evaluate 12 popular LLMs that claim to support contexts of at least 128K tokens. While they perform well in short contexts (<1K), performance degrades significantly as context length increases. At 32K, for instance, 10 models drop below 50% of their strong short-length baselines. Even GPT-4o, one of the top-performing exceptions, experiences a reduction from an almost-perfect baseline of 99.3% to 69.7%. Our analysis suggests these declines stem from the increased difficulty the attention mechanism faces in longer contexts when literal matches are absent, making it harder to retrieve relevant information.

We introduce Voyager, the first LLM-powered embodied lifelong learning agent in Minecraft that continuously explores the world, acquires diverse skills, and makes novel discoveries without human intervention. Voyager consists of three key components: 1) an automatic curriculum that maximizes exploration, 2) an ever-growing skill library of executable code for storing and retrieving complex behaviors, and 3) a new iterative prompting mechanism that incorporates environment feedback, execution errors, and self-verification for program improvement. Voyager interacts with GPT-4 via blackbox queries, which bypasses the need for model parameter fine-tuning. The skills developed by Voyager are temporally extended, interpretable, and compositional, which compounds the agent's abilities rapidly and alleviates catastrophic forgetting. Empirically, Voyager shows strong in-context lifelong learning capability and exhibits exceptional proficiency in playing Minecraft. It obtains 3.3x more unique items, travels 2.3x longer distances, and unlocks key tech tree milestones up to 15.3x faster than prior SOTA. Voyager is able to utilize the learned skill library in a new Minecraft world to solve novel tasks from scratch, while other techniques struggle to generalize. We open-source our full codebase and prompts at https://voyager.minedojo.org/.

Text-to-SQL aims to convert natural language questions into executable SQL queries. While previous approaches, such as skeleton-masked selection, have demonstrated strong performance by retrieving similar training examples to guide large language models (LLMs), they struggle in real-world scenarios where such examples are unavailable. To overcome this limitation, we propose Self-Augmentation in-context learning with Fine-grained Example selection for Text-to-SQL (SAFE-SQL), a novel framework that improves SQL generation by generating and filtering self-augmented examples. SAFE-SQL first prompts an LLM to generate multiple Text-to-SQL examples relevant to the test input. Then SAFE-SQL filters these examples through three relevance assessments, constructing high-quality in-context learning examples. Using self-generated examples, SAFE-SQL surpasses the previous zero-shot, and few-shot Text-to-SQL frameworks, achieving higher execution accuracy. Notably, our approach provides additional performance gains in extra hard and unseen scenarios, where conventional methods often fail.

Memory-augmentation is a powerful approach for efficiently incorporating external information into language models, but leads to reduced performance relative to retrieving text. Recent work introduced LUMEN, a memory-retrieval hybrid that partially pre-computes memory and updates memory representations on the fly with a smaller live encoder. We propose GLIMMER, which improves on this approach through 1) exploiting free access to the powerful memory representations by applying a shallow reranker on top of memory to drastically improve retrieval quality at low cost, and 2) incorporating multi-task training to learn a general and higher quality memory and live encoder. GLIMMER achieves strong gains in performance at faster speeds compared to LUMEN and FiD on the KILT benchmark of knowledge-intensive tasks.

Text-rich Graph Knowledge Bases (TG-KBs) have become increasingly crucial for answering queries by providing textual and structural knowledge. However, current retrieval methods often retrieve these two types of knowledge in isolation without considering their mutual reinforcement and some hybrid methods even bypass structural retrieval entirely after neighboring aggregation. To fill in this gap, we propose a Mixture of Structural-and-Textual Retrieval (MoR) to retrieve these two types of knowledge via a Planning-Reasoning-Organizing framework. In the Planning stage, MoR generates textual planning graphs delineating the logic for answering queries. Following planning graphs, in the Reasoning stage, MoR interweaves structural traversal and textual matching to obtain candidates from TG-KBs. In the Organizing stage, MoR further reranks fetched candidates based on their structural trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MoR in harmonizing structural and textual retrieval with insights, including uneven retrieving performance across different query logics and the benefits of integrating structural trajectories for candidate reranking. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yoega/MoR.

Pretraining auto-regressive large language models (LLMs) with retrieval demonstrates better perplexity and factual accuracy by leveraging external databases. However, the size of existing pretrained retrieval-augmented LLM is still limited (e.g., Retro has 7.5B parameters), which limits the effectiveness of instruction tuning and zero-shot generalization. In this work, we introduce Retro 48B, the largest LLM pretrained with retrieval before instruction tuning. Specifically, we continue to pretrain the 43B GPT model on additional 100 billion tokens using the Retro augmentation method by retrieving from 1.2 trillion tokens. The obtained foundation model, Retro 48B, largely outperforms the original 43B GPT in terms of perplexity. After instruction tuning on Retro, InstructRetro demonstrates significant improvement over the instruction tuned GPT on zero-shot question answering (QA) tasks. Specifically, the average improvement of InstructRetro is 7% over its GPT counterpart across 8 short-form QA tasks, and 10% over GPT across 4 challenging long-form QA tasks. Surprisingly, we find that one can ablate the encoder from InstructRetro architecture and directly use its decoder backbone, while achieving comparable results. We hypothesize that pretraining with retrieval makes its decoder good at incorporating context for QA. Our results highlights the promising direction to obtain a better GPT decoder for QA through continued pretraining with retrieval before instruction tuning.

A Conversational Recommender System (CRS) offers increased transparency and control to users by enabling them to engage with the system through a real-time multi-turn dialogue. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an unprecedented ability to converse naturally and incorporate world knowledge and common-sense reasoning into language understanding, unlocking the potential of this paradigm. However, effectively leveraging LLMs within a CRS introduces new technical challenges, including properly understanding and controlling a complex conversation and retrieving from external sources of information. These issues are exacerbated by a large, evolving item corpus and a lack of conversational data for training. In this paper, we provide a roadmap for building an end-to-end large-scale CRS using LLMs. In particular, we propose new implementations for user preference understanding, flexible dialogue management and explainable recommendations as part of an integrated architecture powered by LLMs. For improved personalization, we describe how an LLM can consume interpretable natural language user profiles and use them to modulate session-level context. To overcome conversational data limitations in the absence of an existing production CRS, we propose techniques for building a controllable LLM-based user simulator to generate synthetic conversations. As a proof of concept we introduce RecLLM, a large-scale CRS for YouTube videos built on LaMDA, and demonstrate its fluency and diverse functionality through some illustrative example conversations.

Despite the success of integrating large language models into the development of conversational systems, many studies have shown the effectiveness of retrieving and augmenting external knowledge for informative responses. Hence, many existing studies commonly assume the always need for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in a conversational system without explicit control. This raises a research question about such a necessity. In this study, we propose to investigate the need for each turn of system response to be augmented with external knowledge. In particular, by leveraging human judgements on the binary choice of adaptive augmentation, we develop RAGate, a gating model, which models conversation context and relevant inputs to predict if a conversational system requires RAG for improved responses. We conduct extensive experiments on devising and applying RAGate to conversational models and well-rounded analyses of different conversational scenarios. Our experimental results and analysis indicate the effective application of RAGate in RAG-based conversational systems in identifying system responses for appropriate RAG with high-quality responses and a high generation confidence. This study also identifies the correlation between the generation's confidence level and the relevance of the augmented knowledge.

By leveraging the retrieval of information from external knowledge databases, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities for accomplishing many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, due to the inherent flaws of current retrieval systems, there might exist irrelevant information within those retrieving top-ranked passages. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into the robustness of LLMs to different types of irrelevant information under various conditions. We initially introduce a framework to construct high-quality irrelevant information that ranges from semantically unrelated, partially related, and related to questions. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the constructed irrelevant information not only scores highly on similarity metrics, being highly retrieved by existing systems, but also bears semantic connections to the context. Our investigation reveals that current LLMs still face challenges in discriminating highly semantically related information and can be easily distracted by these irrelevant yet misleading contents. Besides, we also find that current solutions for handling irrelevant information have limitations in improving the robustness of LLMs to such distractions. Resources are available at https://github.com/Di-viner/LLM-Robustness-to-Irrelevant-Information.

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the most powerful and most unexpected capabilities to emerge in recent transformer-based large language models (LLMs). Yet the mechanisms that underlie it are poorly understood. In this paper, we demonstrate that comparable ICL capabilities can be acquired by an alternative sequence prediction learning method using clone-structured causal graphs (CSCGs). Moreover, a key property of CSCGs is that, unlike transformer-based LLMs, they are {\em interpretable}, which considerably simplifies the task of explaining how ICL works. Specifically, we show that it uses a combination of (a) learning template (schema) circuits for pattern completion, (b) retrieving relevant templates in a context-sensitive manner, and (c) rebinding of novel tokens to appropriate slots in the templates. We go on to marshall evidence for the hypothesis that similar mechanisms underlie ICL in LLMs. For example, we find that, with CSCGs as with LLMs, different capabilities emerge at different levels of overparameterization, suggesting that overparameterization helps in learning more complex template (schema) circuits. By showing how ICL can be achieved with small models and datasets, we open up a path to novel architectures, and take a vital step towards a more general understanding of the mechanics behind this important capability.

Long context large language models (LLMs) pose significant challenges for efficient serving due to the large memory footprint and high access overhead of KV cache. Retrieval-based KV cache reduction methods can mitigate these challenges, typically by offloading the complete KV cache to CPU and retrieving necessary tokens on demand during inference. However, these methods still suffer from unsatisfactory accuracy degradation and extra retrieval overhead. To address these limitations, this paper proposes A^2ATS, a novel retrieval-based KV cache reduction method. A^2ATS aims to obtain an accurate approximation of attention scores by applying the vector quantization technique to key states, thereby enabling efficient and precise retrieval of the top-K tokens. First, we propose Windowed Rotary Position Embedding, which decouples the positional dependency from query and key states after position embedding. Then, we propose query-aware vector quantization that optimizes the objective of attention score approximation directly. Finally, we design the heterogeneous inference architecture for KV cache offloading, enabling long context serving with larger batch sizes. Experimental results demonstrate that A^2ATS can achieve a lower performance degradation with similar or lower overhead compared to existing methods, thereby increasing long context serving throughput by up to 2.7 times.

Chart visualizations, while essential for data interpretation and communication, are predominantly accessible only as images in PDFs, lacking source data tables and stylistic information. To enable effective editing of charts in PDFs or digital scans, we present PlotEdit, a novel multi-agent framework for natural language-driven end-to-end chart image editing via self-reflective LLM agents. PlotEdit orchestrates five LLM agents: (1) Chart2Table for data table extraction, (2) Chart2Vision for style attribute identification, (3) Chart2Code for retrieving rendering code, (4) Instruction Decomposition Agent for parsing user requests into executable steps, and (5) Multimodal Editing Agent for implementing nuanced chart component modifications - all coordinated through multimodal feedback to maintain visual fidelity. PlotEdit outperforms existing baselines on the ChartCraft dataset across style, layout, format, and data-centric edits, enhancing accessibility for visually challenged users and improving novice productivity.

The application of machine learning to medical ultrasound videos of the heart, i.e., echocardiography, has recently gained traction with the availability of large public datasets. Traditional supervised tasks, such as ejection fraction regression, are now making way for approaches focusing more on the latent structure of data distributions, as well as generative methods. We propose a model trained exclusively by knowledge distillation, either on real or synthetical data, involving retrieving masks suggested by a teacher model. We achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) values on the task of identifying end-diastolic and end-systolic frames. By training the model only on synthetic data, it reaches segmentation capabilities close to the performance when trained on real data with a significantly reduced number of weights. A comparison with the 5 main existing methods shows that our method outperforms the others in most cases. We also present a new evaluation method that does not require human annotation and instead relies on a large auxiliary model. We show that this method produces scores consistent with those obtained from human annotations. Relying on the integrated knowledge from a vast amount of records, this method overcomes certain inherent limitations of human annotator labeling. Code: https://github.com/GregoirePetit/EchoDFKD

Mastering basketball skills such as diverse layups and dribbling involves complex interactions with the ball and requires real-time adjustments. Traditional reinforcement learning methods for interaction skills rely on labor-intensive, manually designed rewards that do not generalize well across different skills. Inspired by how humans learn from demonstrations, we propose SkillMimic, a data-driven approach that mimics both human and ball motions to learn a wide variety of basketball skills. SkillMimic employs a unified configuration to learn diverse skills from human-ball motion datasets, with skill diversity and generalization improving as the dataset grows. This approach allows training a single policy to learn multiple skills, enabling smooth skill switching even if these switches are not present in the reference dataset. The skills acquired by SkillMimic can be easily reused by a high-level controller to accomplish complex basketball tasks. To evaluate our approach, we introduce two basketball datasets: one estimated through monocular RGB videos and the other using advanced motion capture equipment, collectively containing about 35 minutes of diverse basketball skills. Experiments show that our method can effectively learn various basketball skills included in the dataset with a unified configuration, including various styles of dribbling, layups, and shooting. Furthermore, by training a high-level controller to reuse the acquired skills, we can achieve complex basketball tasks such as layup scoring, which involves dribbling toward the basket, timing the dribble and layup to score, retrieving the rebound, and repeating the process. The project page and video demonstrations are available at https://ingrid789.github.io/SkillMimic/

The burgeoning integration of 3D medical imaging into healthcare has led to a substantial increase in the workload of medical professionals. To assist clinicians in their diagnostic processes and alleviate their workload, the development of a robust system for retrieving similar case studies presents a viable solution. While the concept holds great promise, the field of 3D medical text-image retrieval is currently limited by the absence of robust evaluation benchmarks and curated datasets. To remedy this, our study presents a groundbreaking dataset, BIMCV-R (This dataset will be released upon acceptance.), which includes an extensive collection of 8,069 3D CT volumes, encompassing over 2 million slices, paired with their respective radiological reports. Expanding upon the foundational work of our dataset, we craft a retrieval strategy, MedFinder. This approach employs a dual-stream network architecture, harnessing the potential of large language models to advance the field of medical image retrieval beyond existing text-image retrieval solutions. It marks our preliminary step towards developing a system capable of facilitating text-to-image, image-to-text, and keyword-based retrieval tasks.

Processing and reasoning over long contexts is crucial for many practical applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as document comprehension and agent construction. Despite recent strides in making LLMs process contexts with more than 100K tokens, there is currently a lack of a standardized benchmark to evaluate this long-context capability. Existing public benchmarks typically focus on contexts around 10K tokens, limiting the assessment and comparison of LLMs in processing longer contexts. In this paper, we propose inftyBench, the first LLM benchmark featuring an average data length surpassing 100K tokens. inftyBench comprises synthetic and realistic tasks spanning diverse domains, presented in both English and Chinese. The tasks in inftyBench are designed to require well understanding of long dependencies in contexts, and make simply retrieving a limited number of passages from contexts not sufficient for these tasks. In our experiments, based on inftyBench, we evaluate the state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source LLMs tailored for processing long contexts. The results indicate that existing long context LLMs still require significant advancements to effectively process 100K+ context. We further present three intriguing analyses regarding the behavior of LLMs processing long context.

The labor market is changing rapidly, prompting increased interest in the automatic extraction of occupational skills from text. With the advent of English benchmark job description datasets, there is a need for systems that handle their diversity well. We tackle the complexity in occupational skill datasets tasks -- combining and leveraging multiple datasets for skill extraction, to identify rarely observed skills within a dataset, and overcoming the scarcity of skills across datasets. In particular, we investigate the retrieval-augmentation of language models, employing an external datastore for retrieving similar skills in a dataset-unifying manner. Our proposed method, Nearest Neighbor Occupational Skill Extraction (NNOSE) effectively leverages multiple datasets by retrieving neighboring skills from other datasets in the datastore. This improves skill extraction without additional fine-tuning. Crucially, we observe a performance gain in predicting infrequent patterns, with substantial gains of up to 30\% span-F1 in cross-dataset settings.

Recent proprietary large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have achieved a milestone in tackling diverse challenges in the biomedical domain, ranging from multiple-choice questions to long-form generations. To address challenges that still cannot be handled with the encoded knowledge of LLMs, various retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods have been developed by searching documents from the knowledge corpus and appending them unconditionally or selectively to the input of LLMs for generation. However, when applying existing methods to different domain-specific problems, poor generalization becomes apparent, leading to fetching incorrect documents or making inaccurate judgments. In this paper, we introduce Self-BioRAG, a framework reliable for biomedical text that specializes in generating explanations, retrieving domain-specific documents, and self-reflecting generated responses. We utilize 84k filtered biomedical instruction sets to train Self-BioRAG that can assess its generated explanations with customized reflective tokens. Our work proves that domain-specific components, such as a retriever, domain-related document corpus, and instruction sets are necessary for adhering to domain-related instructions. Using three major medical question-answering benchmark datasets, experimental results of Self-BioRAG demonstrate significant performance gains by achieving a 7.2% absolute improvement on average over the state-of-the-art open-foundation model with a parameter size of 7B or less. Overall, we analyze that Self-BioRAG finds the clues in the question, retrieves relevant documents if needed, and understands how to answer with information from retrieved documents and encoded knowledge as a medical expert does. We release our data and code for training our framework components and model weights (7B and 13B) to enhance capabilities in biomedical and clinical domains.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in interacting with visual content with myriad potential downstream tasks. However, even though a list of benchmarks has been proposed, the capabilities and limitations of MLLMs are still not comprehensively understood, due to a lack of a standardized and holistic evaluation framework. To this end, we present the first Comprehensive Evaluation Framework (ChEF) that can holistically profile each MLLM and fairly compare different MLLMs. First, we structure ChEF as four modular components, i.e., Scenario as scalable multimodal datasets, Instruction as flexible instruction retrieving formulae, Inferencer as reliable question answering strategies, and Metric as indicative task-specific score functions. Based on them, ChEF facilitates versatile evaluations in a standardized framework, and new evaluations can be built by designing new Recipes (systematic selection of these four components). Notably, current MLLM benchmarks can be readily summarized as recipes of ChEF. Second, we introduce 6 new recipes to quantify competent MLLMs' desired capabilities (or called desiderata, i.e., calibration, in-context learning, instruction following, language performance, hallucination, and robustness) as reliable agents that can perform real-world multimodal interactions. Third, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of 9 prominent MLLMs on 9 scenarios and 6 desiderata. Our evaluation summarized over 20 valuable observations concerning the generalizability of MLLMs across various scenarios and the composite capability of MLLMs required for multimodal interactions. We will publicly release all the detailed implementations for further analysis, as well as an easy-to-use modular toolkit for the integration of new recipes and models, so that ChEF can be a growing evaluation framework for the MLLM community.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims at generating facial movements that are synchronized with the driving speech, which has been widely explored recently. Existing works mostly neglect the person-specific talking style in generation, including facial expression and head pose styles. Several works intend to capture the personalities by fine-tuning modules. However, limited training data leads to the lack of vividness. In this work, we propose AdaMesh, a novel adaptive speech-driven facial animation approach, which learns the personalized talking style from a reference video of about 10 seconds and generates vivid facial expressions and head poses. Specifically, we propose mixture-of-low-rank adaptation (MoLoRA) to fine-tune the expression adapter, which efficiently captures the facial expression style. For the personalized pose style, we propose a pose adapter by building a discrete pose prior and retrieving the appropriate style embedding with a semantic-aware pose style matrix without fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, preserves the talking style in the reference video, and generates vivid facial animation. The supplementary video and code will be available at https://adamesh.github.io.

Modern Deep Learning (DL) architectures based on transformers (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa) are exhibiting performance improvements across a number of natural language tasks. While such DL models have shown tremendous potential for use in software engineering applications, they are often hampered by insufficient training data. Particularly constrained are applications that require project-specific data, such as bug localization, which aims at recommending code to fix a newly submitted bug report. Deep learning models for bug localization require a substantial training set of fixed bug reports, which are at a limited quantity even in popular and actively developed software projects. In this paper, we examine the effect of using synthetic training data on transformer-based DL models that perform a more complex variant of bug localization, which has the goal of retrieving bug-inducing changesets for each bug report. To generate high-quality synthetic data, we propose novel data augmentation operators that act on different constituent components of bug reports. We also describe a data balancing strategy that aims to create a corpus of augmented bug reports that better reflects the entire source code base, because existing bug reports used as training data usually reference a small part of the code base.

Large language models are powerful text processors and reasoners, but are still subject to limitations including outdated knowledge and hallucinations, which necessitates connecting them to the world. Retrieval-augmented large language models have raised extensive attention for grounding model generation on external knowledge. However, retrievers struggle to capture relevance, especially for queries with complex information needs. Recent work has proposed to improve relevance modeling by having large language models actively involved in retrieval, i.e., to improve retrieval with generation. In this paper, we show that strong performance can be achieved by a method we call Iter-RetGen, which synergizes retrieval and generation in an iterative manner. A model output shows what might be needed to finish a task, and thus provides an informative context for retrieving more relevant knowledge which in turn helps generate a better output in the next iteration. Compared with recent work which interleaves retrieval with generation when producing an output, Iter-RetGen processes all retrieved knowledge as a whole and largely preserves the flexibility in generation without structural constraints. We evaluate Iter-RetGen on multi-hop question answering, fact verification, and commonsense reasoning, and show that it can flexibly leverage parametric knowledge and non-parametric knowledge, and is superior to or competitive with state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented baselines while causing fewer overheads of retrieval and generation. We can further improve performance via generation-augmented retrieval adaptation.

The performance of large language models (LLMs) on existing reasoning benchmarks has significantly improved over the past years. In response, we present JEEBench, a considerably more challenging benchmark dataset for evaluating the problem solving abilities of LLMs. We curate 515 challenging pre-engineering mathematics, physics and chemistry problems from the highly competitive IIT JEE-Advanced exam. Long-horizon reasoning on top of deep in-domain knowledge is essential for solving problems in this benchmark. Our evaluation on various open-source and proprietary models reveals that the highest performance, even after using techniques like self-consistency, self-refinement and chain-of-thought prompting, is less than 40%. The typical failure modes of GPT-4, the best model, are errors in algebraic manipulation, difficulty in grounding abstract concepts into mathematical equations accurately and failure in retrieving relevant domain-specific concepts. We also observe that by mere prompting, GPT-4 is unable to assess risk introduced by negative marking for incorrect answers. For this, we develop a post-hoc confidence-thresholding method over self-consistency, which enables effective response selection. We hope that our challenging benchmark will guide future re-search in problem-solving using LLMs.

With the explosive growth of web videos and emerging large-scale vision-language pre-training models, e.g., CLIP, retrieving videos of interest with text instructions has attracted increasing attention. A common practice is to transfer text-video pairs to the same embedding space and craft cross-modal interactions with certain entities in specific granularities for semantic correspondence. Unfortunately, the intrinsic uncertainties of optimal entity combinations in appropriate granularities for cross-modal queries are understudied, which is especially critical for modalities with hierarchical semantics, e.g., video, text, etc. In this paper, we propose an Uncertainty-Adaptive Text-Video Retrieval approach, termed UATVR, which models each look-up as a distribution matching procedure. Concretely, we add additional learnable tokens in the encoders to adaptively aggregate multi-grained semantics for flexible high-level reasoning. In the refined embedding space, we represent text-video pairs as probabilistic distributions where prototypes are sampled for matching evaluation. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmarks justify the superiority of our UATVR, which achieves new state-of-the-art results on MSR-VTT (50.8%), VATEX (64.5%), MSVD (49.7%), and DiDeMo (45.8%). The code is available at https://github.com/bofang98/UATVR.

Knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-domain question answering (QA), require access to a large amount of world or domain knowledge. A common approach for knowledge-intensive tasks is to employ a retrieve-then-read pipeline that first retrieves a handful of relevant contextual documents from an external corpus such as Wikipedia and then predicts an answer conditioned on the retrieved documents. In this paper, we present a novel perspective for solving knowledge-intensive tasks by replacing document retrievers with large language model generators. We call our method generate-then-read (GenRead), which first prompts a large language model to generate contextutal documents based on a given question, and then reads the generated documents to produce the final answer. Furthermore, we propose a novel clustering-based prompting method that selects distinct prompts, resulting in the generated documents that cover different perspectives, leading to better recall over acceptable answers. We conduct extensive experiments on three different knowledge-intensive tasks, including open-domain QA, fact checking, and dialogue system. Notably, GenRead achieves 71.6 and 54.4 exact match scores on TriviaQA and WebQ, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art retrieve-then-read pipeline DPR-FiD by +4.0 and +3.9, without retrieving any documents from any external knowledge source. Lastly, we demonstrate the model performance can be further improved by combining retrieval and generation. Our code and generated documents can be found at https://github.com/wyu97/GenRead.

Extreme Classification (XC) seeks to tag data points with the most relevant subset of labels from an extremely large label set. Performing deep XC with dense, learnt representations for data points and labels has attracted much attention due to its superiority over earlier XC methods that used sparse, hand-crafted features. Negative mining techniques have emerged as a critical component of all deep XC methods that allow them to scale to millions of labels. However, despite recent advances, training deep XC models with large encoder architectures such as transformers remains challenging. This paper identifies that memory overheads of popular negative mining techniques often force mini-batch sizes to remain small and slow training down. In response, this paper introduces NGAME, a light-weight mini-batch creation technique that offers provably accurate in-batch negative samples. This allows training with larger mini-batches offering significantly faster convergence and higher accuracies than existing negative sampling techniques. NGAME was found to be up to 16% more accurate than state-of-the-art methods on a wide array of benchmark datasets for extreme classification, as well as 3% more accurate at retrieving search engine queries in response to a user webpage visit to show personalized ads. In live A/B tests on a popular search engine, NGAME yielded up to 23% gains in click-through-rates.

Generating plans of action, and reasoning about change have long been considered a core competence of intelligent agents. It is thus no surprise that evaluating the planning and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has become a hot topic of research. Most claims about LLM planning capabilities are however based on common sense tasks-where it becomes hard to tell whether LLMs are planning or merely retrieving from their vast world knowledge. There is a strong need for systematic and extensible planning benchmarks with sufficient diversity to evaluate whether LLMs have innate planning capabilities. Motivated by this, we propose PlanBench, an extensible benchmark suite based on the kinds of domains used in the automated planning community, especially in the International Planning Competition, to test the capabilities of LLMs in planning or reasoning about actions and change. PlanBench provides sufficient diversity in both the task domains and the specific planning capabilities. Our studies also show that on many critical capabilities-including plan generation-LLM performance falls quite short, even with the SOTA models. PlanBench can thus function as a useful marker of progress of LLMs in planning and reasoning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on the Key-Value (KV) Cache to store token history, enabling efficient decoding of tokens. As the KV-Cache grows, it becomes a major memory and computation bottleneck, however, there is an opportunity to alleviate this bottleneck, especially because prior research has shown that only a small subset of tokens contribute meaningfully to each decoding step. A key challenge in finding these critical tokens is that they are dynamic, and heavily input query-dependent. Existing methods either risk quality by evicting tokens permanently, or retain the full KV-Cache but rely on retrieving chunks (pages) of tokens at generation, failing at dense, context-rich tasks. Additionally, many existing KV-Cache sparsity methods rely on inaccurate proxies for token importance. To address these limitations, we introduce TokenButler, a high-granularity, query-aware predictor that learns to identify these critical tokens. By training a light-weight predictor with less than 1.2% parameter overhead, TokenButler prioritizes tokens based on their contextual, predicted importance. This improves perplexity & downstream accuracy by over 8% relative to SoTA methods for estimating token importance. We evaluate TokenButler on a novel synthetic small-context co-referential retrieval task, demonstrating near-oracle accuracy. Code, models and benchmarks: https://github.com/abdelfattah-lab/TokenButler

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has shown impressive capabilities in mitigating hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs struggle to handle misleading retrievals and often fail to maintain their own reasoning when exposed to conflicting or selectively-framed evidence, making them vulnerable to real-world misinformation. In such real-world retrieval scenarios, misleading and conflicting information is rampant, particularly in the political domain, where evidence is often selectively framed, incomplete, or polarized. However, existing RAG benchmarks largely assume a clean retrieval setting, where models succeed by accurately retrieving and generating answers from gold-standard documents. This assumption fails to align with real-world conditions, leading to an overestimation of RAG system performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce RAGuard, a fact-checking dataset designed to evaluate the robustness of RAG systems against misleading retrievals. Unlike prior benchmarks that rely on synthetic noise, our dataset constructs its retrieval corpus from Reddit discussions, capturing naturally occurring misinformation. It categorizes retrieved evidence into three types: supporting, misleading, and irrelevant, providing a realistic and challenging testbed for assessing how well RAG systems navigate different retrieval information. Our benchmark experiments reveal that when exposed to misleading retrievals, all tested LLM-powered RAG systems perform worse than their zero-shot baselines (i.e., no retrieval at all), highlighting their susceptibility to noisy environments. To the best of our knowledge, RAGuard is the first benchmark to systematically assess RAG robustness against misleading evidence. We expect this benchmark will drive future research toward improving RAG systems beyond idealized datasets, making them more reliable for real-world applications.

Recent text-to-image generative models, e.g., Stable Diffusion V3 and Flux, have achieved notable progress. However, these models are strongly restricted to their limited knowledge, a.k.a., their own fixed parameters, that are trained with closed datasets. This leads to significant hallucinations or distortions when facing fine-grained and unseen novel real-world objects, e.g., the appearance of the Tesla Cybertruck. To this end, we present the first real-object-based retrieval-augmented generation framework (RealRAG), which augments fine-grained and unseen novel object generation by learning and retrieving real-world images to overcome the knowledge gaps of generative models. Specifically, to integrate missing memory for unseen novel object generation, we train a reflective retriever by self-reflective contrastive learning, which injects the generator's knowledge into the sef-reflective negatives, ensuring that the retrieved augmented images compensate for the model's missing knowledge. Furthermore, the real-object-based framework integrates fine-grained visual knowledge for the generative models, tackling the distortion problem and improving the realism for fine-grained object generation. Our Real-RAG is superior in its modular application to all types of state-of-the-art text-to-image generative models and also delivers remarkable performance boosts with all of them, such as a gain of 16.18% FID score with the auto-regressive model on the Stanford Car benchmark.

Lifelong learning, also known as continual or incremental learning, is a crucial component for advancing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by enabling systems to continuously adapt in dynamic environments. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing, existing LLM agents are typically designed for static systems and lack the ability to adapt over time in response to new challenges. This survey is the first to systematically summarize the potential techniques for incorporating lifelong learning into LLM-based agents. We categorize the core components of these agents into three modules: the perception module for multimodal input integration, the memory module for storing and retrieving evolving knowledge, and the action module for grounded interactions with the dynamic environment. We highlight how these pillars collectively enable continuous adaptation, mitigate catastrophic forgetting, and improve long-term performance. This survey provides a roadmap for researchers and practitioners working to develop lifelong learning capabilities in LLM agents, offering insights into emerging trends, evaluation metrics, and application scenarios. Relevant literature and resources are available at this url{https://github.com/qianlima-lab/awesome-lifelong-llm-agent}.

This study introduces CLASP (Contrastive Language-Speech Pretraining), a multilingual, multimodal representation tailored for audio-text information retrieval. CLASP leverages the synergy between spoken content and textual data. During training, we utilize our newly introduced speech-text dataset, which encompasses 15 diverse categories ranging from fiction to religion. CLASP's audio component integrates audio spectrograms with a pre-trained self-supervised speech model, while its language encoding counterpart employs a sentence encoder pre-trained on over 100 languages. This unified lightweight model bridges the gap between various modalities and languages, enhancing its effectiveness in handling and retrieving multilingual and multimodal data. Our evaluations across multiple languages demonstrate that CLASP establishes new benchmarks in HITS@1, MRR, and meanR metrics, outperforming traditional ASR-based retrieval approaches in specific scenarios.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires models to continually acquire knowledge of new classes without forgetting old ones. Despite Pre-trained Models (PTMs) have shown excellent performance in CIL, catastrophic forgetting still occurs as the model learns new concepts. Existing work seeks to utilize lightweight components to adjust the PTM, while the forgetting phenomenon still comes from {\em parameter and retrieval} levels. Specifically, iterative updates of the model result in parameter drift, while mistakenly retrieving irrelevant modules leads to the mismatch during inference. To this end, we propose MOdel Surgery (MOS) to rescue the model from forgetting previous knowledge. By training task-specific adapters, we continually adjust the PTM to downstream tasks. To mitigate parameter-level forgetting, we present an adapter merging approach to learn task-specific adapters, which aims to bridge the gap between different components while reserve task-specific information. Besides, to address retrieval-level forgetting, we introduce a training-free self-refined adapter retrieval mechanism during inference, which leverages the model's inherent ability for better adapter retrieval. By jointly rectifying the model with those steps, MOS can robustly resist catastrophic forgetting in the learning process. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets validate MOS's state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/sun-hailong/AAAI25-MOS

Ensuring that Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) align with higher-level organizational or national requirements is vital, particularly in regulated environments such as finance and aerospace. In these domains, maintaining consistency, adhering to regulatory frameworks, minimizing errors, and meeting critical expectations are essential for the reliable functioning of systems. The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) highlights their immense potential, yet there remains considerable scope for improvement in retrieving relevant information and enhancing reasoning capabilities. This study demonstrates that integrating a robust Graph-RAG framework with advanced prompt engineering techniques, such as Chain of Thought and Tree of Thought, can significantly enhance performance. Compared to baseline RAG methods and simple prompting strategies, this approach delivers more accurate and context-aware results. While this method demonstrates significant improvements in performance, it comes with challenges. It is both costly and more complex to implement across diverse contexts, requiring careful adaptation to specific scenarios. Additionally, its effectiveness heavily relies on having complete and accurate input data, which may not always be readily available, posing further limitations to its scalability and practicality.

This paper presents the system description of our entry for the COLING 2025 RegNLP RIRAG (Regulatory Information Retrieval and Answer Generation) challenge, focusing on leveraging advanced information retrieval and answer generation techniques in regulatory domains. We experimented with a combination of embedding models, including Stella, BGE, CDE, and Mpnet, and leveraged fine-tuning and reranking for retrieving relevant documents in top ranks. We utilized a novel approach, LeSeR, which achieved competitive results with a recall@10 of 0.8201 and map@10 of 0.6655 for retrievals. This work highlights the transformative potential of natural language processing techniques in regulatory applications, offering insights into their capabilities for implementing a retrieval augmented generation system while identifying areas for future improvement in robustness and domain adaptation.

Surgical practice involves complex visual interpretation, procedural skills, and advanced medical knowledge, making surgical vision-language pretraining (VLP) particularly challenging due to this complexity and the limited availability of annotated data. To address the gap, we propose OphCLIP, a hierarchical retrieval-augmented vision-language pretraining framework specifically designed for ophthalmic surgical workflow understanding. OphCLIP leverages the OphVL dataset we constructed, a large-scale and comprehensive collection of over 375K hierarchically structured video-text pairs with tens of thousands of different combinations of attributes (surgeries, phases/operations/actions, instruments, medications, as well as more advanced aspects like the causes of eye diseases, surgical objectives, and postoperative recovery recommendations, etc). These hierarchical video-text correspondences enable OphCLIP to learn both fine-grained and long-term visual representations by aligning short video clips with detailed narrative descriptions and full videos with structured titles, capturing intricate surgical details and high-level procedural insights, respectively. Our OphCLIP also designs a retrieval-augmented pretraining framework to leverage the underexplored large-scale silent surgical procedure videos, automatically retrieving semantically relevant content to enhance the representation learning of narrative videos. Evaluation across 11 datasets for phase recognition and multi-instrument identification shows OphCLIP's robust generalization and superior performance.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities, but they still struggle with faithful reasoning due to knowledge gaps and hallucinations. To address these issues, knowledge graphs (KGs) have been utilized to enhance LLM reasoning through their structured knowledge. However, existing KG-enhanced methods, either retrieval-based or agent-based, encounter difficulties in accurately retrieving knowledge and efficiently traversing KGs at scale. In this work, we introduce graph-constrained reasoning (GCR), a novel framework that bridges structured knowledge in KGs with unstructured reasoning in LLMs. To eliminate hallucinations, GCR ensures faithful KG-grounded reasoning by integrating KG structure into the LLM decoding process through KG-Trie, a trie-based index that encodes KG reasoning paths. KG-Trie constrains the decoding process, allowing LLMs to directly reason on graphs and generate faithful reasoning paths grounded in KGs. Additionally, GCR leverages a lightweight KG-specialized LLM for graph-constrained reasoning alongside a powerful general LLM for inductive reasoning over multiple reasoning paths, resulting in accurate reasoning with zero reasoning hallucination. Extensive experiments on several KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that GCR achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong zero-shot generalizability to unseen KGs without additional training.

This paper proposes a Question-Answering (QA) system for the telecom domain using 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) technical documents. Alongside, a hybrid dataset, Telco-DPR, which consists of a curated 3GPP corpus in a hybrid format, combining text and tables, is presented. Additionally, the dataset includes a set of synthetic question/answer pairs designed to evaluate the retrieval performance of QA systems on this type of data. The retrieval models, including the sparse model, Best Matching 25 (BM25), as well as dense models, such as Dense Passage Retriever (DPR) and Dense Hierarchical Retrieval (DHR), are evaluated and compared using top-K accuracy and Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). The results show that DHR, a retriever model utilising hierarchical passage selection through fine-tuning at both the document and passage levels, outperforms traditional methods in retrieving relevant technical information, achieving a Top-10 accuracy of 86.2%. Additionally, the Retriever-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique, used in the proposed QA system, is evaluated to demonstrate the benefits of using the hybrid dataset and the DHR. The proposed QA system, using the developed RAG model and the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT)-4, achieves a 14% improvement in answer accuracy, when compared to a previous benchmark on the same dataset.

What will information entry look like in the next generation of digital products? Since the 1970s, user access to relevant information has relied on domain-specific architectures of information retrieval (IR). Over the past two decades, the advent of modern IR systems, including web search engines and personalized recommender systems, has greatly improved the efficiency of retrieving relevant information from vast data corpora. However, the core paradigm of these IR systems remains largely unchanged, relying on filtering a predefined set of candidate items. Since 2022, breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have begun transforming how information is accessed, establishing a new technical paradigm. In this position paper, we introduce Agentic Information Retrieval (Agentic IR), a novel IR paradigm shaped by the capabilities of LLM agents. Agentic IR expands the scope of accessible tasks and leverages a suite of new techniques to redefine information retrieval. We discuss three types of cutting-edge applications of agentic IR and the challenges faced. We propose that agentic IR holds promise for generating innovative applications, potentially becoming a central information entry point in future digital ecosystems.

Current vision-language models (VLMs) still exhibit inferior performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, primarily due to the challenge of accurately encoding all the associations between visual objects and scenes to their corresponding entities and background knowledge. While retrieval augmentation methods offer an efficient way to integrate external knowledge, extending them to vision-language domain presents unique challenges in (1) precisely retrieving relevant information from external sources due to the inherent discrepancy within the multimodal queries, and (2) being resilient to the irrelevant, extraneous and noisy information contained in the retrieved multimodal knowledge snippets. In this work, we introduce RORA-VLM, a novel and robust retrieval augmentation framework specifically tailored for VLMs, with two key innovations: (1) a 2-stage retrieval process with image-anchored textual-query expansion to synergistically combine the visual and textual information in the query and retrieve the most relevant multimodal knowledge snippets; and (2) a robust retrieval augmentation method that strengthens the resilience of VLMs against irrelevant information in the retrieved multimodal knowledge by injecting adversarial noises into the retrieval-augmented training process, and filters out extraneous visual information, such as unrelated entities presented in images, via a query-oriented visual token refinement strategy. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed methods on three widely adopted benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that with a minimal amount of training instance, RORA-VLM enables the base model to achieve significant performance improvement and constantly outperform state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented VLMs on all benchmarks while also exhibiting a novel zero-shot domain transfer capability.

Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems concatenate and process numerous retrieved document chunks for prefill which requires a large volume of computation, therefore leading to significant latency in time-to-first-token (TTFT). To reduce the computation overhead as well as TTFT, we introduce TurboRAG, a novel RAG system that redesigns the inference paradigm of the current RAG system by first pre-computing and storing the key-value (KV) caches of documents offline, and then directly retrieving the saved KV cache for prefill. Hence, online computation of KV caches is eliminated during inference. In addition, we provide a number of insights into the mask matrix and positional embedding mechanisms, plus fine-tune a pretrained language model to maintain model accuracy of TurboRAG. Our approach is applicable to most existing large language models and their applications without any requirement in modification of models and inference systems. Experimental results across a suite of RAG benchmarks demonstrate that TurboRAG reduces TTFT by up to 9.4x compared to the conventional RAG systems (on an average of 8.6x), but reserving comparable performance to the standard RAG systems.

Information Retrieval (IR) methods aim to identify relevant documents in response to a given query, which have gained remarkable attention due to their successful application in various natural language tasks. However, existing approaches typically consider only the textual information within the documents, which overlooks the fact that documents can contain multiple modalities, including texts, images, and tables. Further, they often segment each long document into multiple discrete passages for embedding, preventing them from capturing the overall document context and interactions between paragraphs. We argue that these two limitations lead to suboptimal document representations for retrieval. In this work, to address them, we aim to produce more comprehensive and nuanced document representations by holistically embedding documents interleaved with different modalities. Specifically, we achieve this by leveraging the capability of recent vision-language models that enable the processing and integration of text, images, and tables into a unified format and representation. Moreover, to mitigate the information loss from segmenting documents into passages, instead of representing and retrieving passages individually, we further merge the representations of segmented passages into one single document representation, while we additionally introduce a reranking strategy to decouple and identify the relevant passage within the document if necessary. Then, through extensive experiments on diverse information retrieval scenarios considering both the textual and multimodal queries, we show that our approach substantially outperforms relevant baselines, thanks to the consideration of the multimodal information interleaved within the documents in a unified way.

Evaluating instruction following capabilities for multimodal, multi-turn dialogue is challenging. With potentially multiple instructions in the input model context, the task is time-consuming for human raters and we show LLM based judges are biased towards answers from the same model. We propose MMMT-IF, an image based multi-turn Q&A evaluation set with added global instructions between questions, constraining the answer format. This challenges models to retrieve instructions dispersed across long dialogues and reason under instruction constraints. All instructions are objectively verifiable through code execution. We introduce the Programmatic Instruction Following (PIF) metric to measure the fraction of the instructions that are correctly followed while performing a reasoning task. The PIF-N-K set of metrics further evaluates robustness by measuring the fraction of samples in a corpus where, for each sample, at least K out of N generated model responses achieve a PIF score of one. The PIF metric aligns with human instruction following ratings, showing 60 percent correlation. Experiments show Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, have a PIF metric that drops from 0.81 on average at turn 1 across the models, to 0.64 at turn 20. Across all turns, when each response is repeated 4 times (PIF-4-4), GPT-4o and Gemini successfully follow all instructions only 11% of the time. When all the instructions are also appended to the end of the model input context, the PIF metric improves by 22.3 points on average, showing that the challenge with the task lies not only in following the instructions, but also in retrieving the instructions spread out in the model context. We plan to open source the MMMT-IF dataset and metric computation code.

We introduce tulip agent, an architecture for autonomous LLM-based agents with Create, Read, Update, and Delete access to a tool library containing a potentially large number of tools. In contrast to state-of-the-art implementations, tulip agent does not encode the descriptions of all available tools in the system prompt, which counts against the model's context window, or embed the entire prompt for retrieving suitable tools. Instead, the tulip agent can recursively search for suitable tools in its extensible tool library, implemented exemplarily as a vector store. The tulip agent architecture significantly reduces inference costs, allows using even large tool libraries, and enables the agent to adapt and extend its set of tools. We evaluate the architecture with several ablation studies in a mathematics context and demonstrate its generalizability with an application to robotics. A reference implementation and the benchmark are available at github.com/HRI-EU/tulip_agent.

Cue points indicate possible temporal boundaries in a transition between two pieces of music in DJ mixing and constitute a crucial element in autonomous DJ systems as well as for live mixing. In this work, we present a novel method for automatic cue point estimation, interpreted as a computer vision object detection task. Our proposed system is based on a pre-trained object detection transformer which we fine-tune on our novel cue point dataset. Our provided dataset contains 21k manually annotated cue points from human experts as well as metronome information for nearly 5k individual tracks, making this dataset 35x larger than the previously available cue point dataset. Unlike previous methods, our approach does not require low-level musical information analysis, while demonstrating increased precision in retrieving cue point positions. Moreover, our proposed method demonstrates high adherence to phrasing, a type of high-level music structure commonly emphasized in electronic dance music. The code, model checkpoints, and dataset are made publicly available.

The retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables retrieval of relevant information from an external knowledge source and allows large language models (LLMs) to answer queries over previously unseen document collections. However, it was demonstrated that traditional RAG applications perform poorly in answering multi-hop questions, which require retrieving and reasoning over multiple elements of supporting evidence. We introduce a new method called Multi-Meta-RAG, which uses database filtering with LLM-extracted metadata to improve the RAG selection of the relevant documents from various sources, relevant to the question. While database filtering is specific to a set of questions from a particular domain and format, we found out that Multi-Meta-RAG greatly improves the results on the MultiHop-RAG benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/mxpoliakov/Multi-Meta-RAG.

Fetching, which includes approaching, grasping, and retrieving, is a critical challenge for robot manipulation tasks. Existing methods primarily focus on table-top scenarios, which do not adequately capture the complexities of environments where both grasping and planning are essential. To address this gap, we propose a new benchmark FetchBench, featuring diverse procedural scenes that integrate both grasping and motion planning challenges. Additionally, FetchBench includes a data generation pipeline that collects successful fetch trajectories for use in imitation learning methods. We implement multiple baselines from the traditional sense-plan-act pipeline to end-to-end behavior models. Our empirical analysis reveals that these methods achieve a maximum success rate of only 20%, indicating substantial room for improvement. Additionally, we identify key bottlenecks within the sense-plan-act pipeline and make recommendations based on the systematic analysis.

Code completion models have made significant progress in recent years. Recently, repository-level code completion has drawn more attention in modern software development, and several baseline methods and benchmarks have been proposed. However, existing repository-level code completion methods often fall short of fully using the extensive context of a project repository, such as the intricacies of relevant files and class hierarchies. Besides, the existing benchmarks usually focus on limited code completion scenarios, which cannot reflect the repository-level code completion abilities well of existing methods. To address these limitations, we propose the R2C2-Coder to enhance and benchmark the real-world repository-level code completion abilities of code Large Language Models, where the R2C2-Coder includes a code prompt construction method R2C2-Enhance and a well-designed benchmark R2C2-Bench. Specifically, first, in R2C2-Enhance, we first construct the candidate retrieval pool and then assemble the completion prompt by retrieving from the retrieval pool for each completion cursor position. Second, based on R2C2 -Enhance, we can construct a more challenging and diverse R2C2-Bench with training, validation and test splits, where a context perturbation strategy is proposed to simulate the real-world repository-level code completion well. Extensive results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our R2C2-Coder.

Neural embedding models have become a fundamental component of modern information retrieval (IR) pipelines. These models produce a single embedding x in R^d per data-point, allowing for fast retrieval via highly optimized maximum inner product search (MIPS) algorithms. Recently, beginning with the landmark ColBERT paper, multi-vector models, which produce a set of embedding per data point, have achieved markedly superior performance for IR tasks. Unfortunately, using these models for IR is computationally expensive due to the increased complexity of multi-vector retrieval and scoring. In this paper, we introduce MUVERA (MUlti-VEctor Retrieval Algorithm), a retrieval mechanism which reduces multi-vector similarity search to single-vector similarity search. This enables the usage of off-the-shelf MIPS solvers for multi-vector retrieval. MUVERA asymmetrically generates Fixed Dimensional Encodings (FDEs) of queries and documents, which are vectors whose inner product approximates multi-vector similarity. We prove that FDEs give high-quality epsilon-approximations, thus providing the first single-vector proxy for multi-vector similarity with theoretical guarantees. Empirically, we find that FDEs achieve the same recall as prior state-of-the-art heuristics while retrieving 2-5times fewer candidates. Compared to prior state of the art implementations, MUVERA achieves consistently good end-to-end recall and latency across a diverse set of the BEIR retrieval datasets, achieving an average of 10% improved recall with 90% lower latency.

Large language models (LLMs) often incorporate multiple text chunks in their inputs to provide the necessary contexts. To speed up the prefill of the long LLM inputs, one can pre-compute the KV cache of a text and re-use the KV cache when the context is reused as the prefix of another LLM input. However, the reused text chunks are not always the input prefix, and when they are not, their precomputed KV caches cannot be directly used since they ignore the text's cross-attention with the preceding text in the LLM input. Thus, the benefits of reusing KV caches remain largely unrealized. This paper tackles just one question: when an LLM input contains multiple text chunks, how to quickly combine their precomputed KV caches in order to achieve the same generation quality as the expensive full prefill (i.e., without reusing KV cache)? We present CacheBlend, a scheme that reuses the pre-computed KV caches, regardless prefix or not, and selectively recomputes the KV values of a small subset of tokens to partially update each reused KV cache. In the meantime,the small extra delay for recomputing some tokens can be pipelined with the retrieval of KV caches within the same job,allowing CacheBlend to store KV caches in slower devices with more storage capacity while retrieving them without increasing the inference delay. By comparing CacheBlend with the state-of-the-art KV cache reusing schemes on three open-source LLMs of various sizes and four popular benchmark datasets of different tasks, we show that CacheBlend reduces time-to-first-token (TTFT) by 2.2-3.3X and increases the inference throughput by 2.8-5X, compared with full KV recompute, without compromising generation quality or incurring more storage cost.

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose G3, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In particular, G3 consists of three steps, i.e., Geo-alignment, Geo-diversification, and Geo-verification to optimize both retrieval and generation phases of worldwide geolocalization. During Geo-alignment, our solution jointly learns expressive multi-modal representations for images, GPS and textual descriptions, which allows us to capture location-aware semantics for retrieving nearby images for a given query. During Geo-diversification, we leverage a prompt ensembling method that is robust to inconsistent retrieval performance for different image queries. Finally, we combine both retrieved and generated GPS candidates in Geo-verification for location prediction. Experiments on two well-established datasets IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k verify the superiority of G3 compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

High Recall Retrieval (HRR), such as eDiscovery and medical systematic review, is a search problem that optimizes the cost of retrieving most relevant documents in a given collection. Iterative approaches, such as iterative relevance feedback and uncertainty sampling, are shown to be effective under various operational scenarios. Despite neural models demonstrating success in other text-related tasks, linear models such as logistic regression, in general, are still more effective and efficient in HRR since the model is trained and retrieves documents from the same fixed collection. In this work, we leverage SPLADE, an efficient retrieval model that transforms documents into contextualized sparse vectors, for HRR. Our approach combines the best of both worlds, leveraging both the contextualization from pretrained language models and the efficiency of linear models. It reduces 10% and 18% of the review cost in two HRR evaluation collections under a one-phase review workflow with a target recall of 80%. The experiment is implemented with TARexp and is available at https://github.com/eugene-yang/LSR-for-TAR.

Recently, deep learning-based language models have significantly enhanced text-to-SQL tasks, with promising applications in retrieving patient records within the medical domain. One notable challenge in such applications is discerning unanswerable queries. Through fine-tuning model, we demonstrate the feasibility of converting medical record inquiries into SQL queries. Additionally, we introduce an entropy-based method to identify and filter out unanswerable results. We further enhance result quality by filtering low-confidence SQL through log probability-based distribution, while grammatical and schema errors are mitigated by executing queries on the actual database. We experimentally verified that our method can filter unanswerable questions, which can be widely utilized even when the parameters of the model are not accessible, and that it can be effectively utilized in practice.