Related papers: Progressively Pretrained Dense Corpus Index for Op…

Open-domain question answering can be formulated as a phrase retrieval problem, in which we can expect huge scalability and speed benefit but often suffer from low accuracy due to the limitation of existing phrase representation models. In…

Information extraction (IE) for visually-rich documents (VRDs) has achieved SOTA performance recently thanks to the adaptation of Transformer-based language models, which shows the great potential of pre-training methods. In this paper, we…

Dual-Encoders is a promising mechanism for answer retrieval in question answering (QA) systems. Currently most conventional Dual-Encoders learn the semantic representations of questions and answers merely through matching score. Researchers…

In the domain of computer vision, Parameter-Efficient Tuning (PET) is increasingly replacing the traditional paradigm of pre-training followed by full fine-tuning. PET is particularly favored for its effectiveness in large foundation…

In this paper, we propose Cross-Thought, a novel approach to pre-training sequence encoder, which is instrumental in building reusable sequence embeddings for large-scale NLP tasks such as question answering. Instead of using the original…

Generating textual descriptions for images has been an attractive problem for the computer vision and natural language processing researchers in recent years. Dozens of models based on deep learning have been proposed to solve this problem.…

Text indexing is a fundamental and well-studied problem. Classic solutions either replace the original text with a compressed representation, e.g., the FM-index and its variants, or keep it uncompressed but attach some redundancy - an index…

Dense retrievers have made significant strides in text retrieval and open-domain question answering. However, most of these achievements have relied heavily on extensive human-annotated supervision. In this study, we aim to develop…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the reliability of large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but it also introduces a new attack surface: corpus poisoning. In this setting, an adversary…

Existing approaches for open-domain question answering (QA) are typically designed for questions that require either single-hop or multi-hop reasoning, which make strong assumptions of the complexity of questions to be answered. Also,…

State-of-the-art Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models for Open-domain Question Answering (QA) are typically trained for span selection using distantly supervised positive examples and heuristically retrieved negative examples. This…

Large pre-trained vision-language models have shown great prominence in transferring pre-acquired knowledge to various domains and downstream tasks with appropriate prompting or tuning. Existing prevalent tuning methods can be generally…

A fundamental trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency needs to be balanced when designing an online question answering system. Effectiveness comes from sophisticated functions such as extractive machine reading comprehension (MRC),…

Open-domain table question answering aims to provide answers to a question by retrieving and extracting information from a large collection of tables. Existing studies of open-domain table QA either directly adopt text retrieval methods or…

We explore leveraging corpus-specific vocabularies that improve both efficiency and effectiveness of learned sparse retrieval systems. We find that pre-training the underlying BERT model on the target corpus, specifically targeting…

In dense retrieval, embedding long texts into dense vectors can result in information loss, leading to inaccurate query-text matching. Additionally, low-quality texts with excessive noise or sparse key information are unlikely to align well…

Neural document retrievers, including dense passage retrieval (DPR), have outperformed classical lexical-matching retrievers, such as BM25, when fine-tuned and tested on specific question-answering datasets. However, it has been shown that…

This paper summarizes our work on the first track of the ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC 9), "Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access". The goal of the task is to generate…

Differentiable Search Index (DSI) utilizes pre-trained language models to perform indexing and document retrieval via end-to-end learning without relying on external indexes. However, DSI requires full re-training to index new documents,…

Learning latent representations from long text sequences is an important first step in many natural language processing applications. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have become a cornerstone for this challenging task. However, the quality…