Related papers: RECONSIDER: Re-Ranking using Span-Focused Cross-At…

Referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to localize a target object within an image based on a given expression. Although recent advances in vision-language models have led to substantial improvements in REC tasks, current REC…

The state of the art in open-domain question answering (QA) relies on an efficient retriever that drastically reduces the search space for the expensive reader. A rather overlooked question in the community is the relationship between the…

Multi-choice Machine Reading Comprehension (MMRC) aims to select the correct answer from a set of options based on a given passage and question. Due to task specific of MMRC, it is non-trivial to transfer knowledge from other MRC tasks such…

Open-domain complex Question Answering (QA) is a difficult task with challenges in evidence retrieval and reasoning. The complexity of such questions could stem from questions being compositional, hybrid evidence, or ambiguity in questions.…

Recent reasoning-focused language models such as DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI o1 have demonstrated strong performance on structured reasoning benchmarks including GSM8K, MATH, and multi-hop question answering tasks. However, their performance…

We introduce Rank1, the first reranking model trained to take advantage of test-time compute. Rank1 demonstrates the applicability within retrieval of using a reasoning language model (i.e. OpenAI's o1, Deepseek's R1, etc.) for distillation…

Cross-encoders distilled from large language models (LLMs) are often more effective re-rankers than cross-encoders fine-tuned on manually labeled data. However, distilled models do not match the effectiveness of their teacher LLMs. We…

Dense Retrieval (DR) has achieved state-of-the-art first-stage ranking effectiveness. However, the efficiency of most existing DR models is limited by the large memory cost of storing dense vectors and the time-consuming nearest neighbor…

Answer selection (answer ranking) is one of the key steps in many kinds of question answering (QA) applications, where deep models have achieved state-of-the-art performance. Among these deep models, recurrent neural network (RNN) based…

A common retrieve-and-rerank paradigm involves retrieving relevant candidates from a broad set using a fast bi-encoder (BE), followed by applying expensive but accurate cross-encoders (CE) to a limited candidate set. However, relying on…

Long-horizon tasks requiring multi-step reasoning and dynamic re-planning remain challenging for large language models (LLMs). Sequential prompting methods are prone to context drift, loss of goal information, and recurrent failure cycles,…

Re-ranking models refine item recommendation lists generated by the prior global ranking model, which have demonstrated their effectiveness in improving the recommendation quality. However, most existing re-ranking solutions only learn from…

The retriever-reader pipeline has shown promising performance in open-domain QA but suffers from a very slow inference speed. Recently proposed question retrieval models tackle this problem by indexing question-answer pairs and searching…

It is not an exaggeration to say that the recent progress in artificial intelligence technology depends on large-scale and high-quality data. Simultaneously, a prevalent issue exists everywhere: the budget for data labeling is constrained.…

Complex question-answering (CQA) involves answering complex natural-language questions on a knowledge base (KB). However, the conventional neural program induction (NPI) approach exhibits uneven performance when the questions have different…

Ranking responses for a given dialogue context is a popular benchmark in which the setup is to re-rank the ground-truth response over a limited set of $n$ responses, where $n$ is typically 10. The predominance of this setup in conversation…

Recently machine learning is being applied to almost every data domain one of which is Question Answering Systems (QAS). A typical Question Answering System is fairly an information retrieval system, which matches documents or text and…

Language models often struggle with cross-mode knowledge retrieval -- the ability to access knowledge learned in one format (mode) when queried in another. We demonstrate that models trained on multiple data sources (e.g., Wikipedia and…

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models tend to take advantage of spurious correlations (also known as dataset bias or annotation artifacts in the research community). Consequently, these models may perform the MRC task without fully…

Conversational speech recognition is regarded as a challenging task due to its free-style speaking and long-term contextual dependencies. Prior work has explored the modeling of long-range context through RNNLM rescoring with improved…