Related papers: LoL: A Comparative Regularization Loss over Query …

Query reformulation is a key mechanism to alleviate the linguistic chasm of query in ad-hoc retrieval. Among various solutions, query reduction effectively removes extraneous terms and specifies concise user intent from long queries.…

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) hold promise to produce language understanding systems that are are factual, efficient, and up-to-date. An important desideratum of RALMs, is that retrieved information helps model performance…

In this paper, we study jointly query reformulation and document relevance estimation, the two essential aspects of information retrieval (IR). Their interactions are modelled as a two-player strategic game: one player, a query formulator,…

Query Expansion using Pseudo Relevance Feedback is a useful and a popular technique for reformulating the query. In our proposed query expansion method, we assume that relevant information can be found within a document near the central…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning and generalization at the expense of degrading memorized knowledge. We challenge this narrative by observing that RL-enhanced models consistently…

Information-seeking dialogue systems are widely used in e-commerce systems, with answers that must be tailored to fit the specific settings of the online system. Given the user query, the information-seeking dialogue systems first retrieve…

Retrieval-augmented language models have exhibited promising performance across various areas of natural language processing (NLP), including fact-critical tasks. However, due to the black-box nature of advanced large language models (LLMs)…

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods…

Considering the limited internal parametric knowledge, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been widely used to extend the knowledge scope of large language models (LLMs). Despite the extensive efforts on RAG research, in existing…

In a number of information retrieval applications (e.g., patent search, literature review, due diligence, etc.), preventing false negatives is more important than preventing false positives. However, approaches designed to reduce review…

Query reformulations have long been a key mechanism to alleviate the vocabulary-mismatch problem in information retrieval, for example by expanding the queries with related query terms or by generating paraphrases of the queries. In this…

AI alignment in the shape of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly treated as a crucial ingredient for high performance large language models. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…

Post-training for large language models (LLMs) is constrained by the high cost of acquiring new knowledge or correcting errors and by the unintended side effects that frequently arise from retraining. To address these issues, we introduce…

Query-focused Summarization (QfS) deals with systems that generate summaries from document(s) based on a query. Motivated by the insight that Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a generalization to Supervised Learning (SL) for Natural…

The Retrieval-Augmented Language Model (RALM) has shown remarkable performance on knowledge-intensive tasks by incorporating external knowledge during inference, which mitigates the factual hallucinations inherited in large language models…

Language model (LM) post-training relies on two stages of human supervision: task demonstrations for supervised finetuning (SFT), followed by preference comparisons for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As LMs become more…

Direct alignment methods typically train large language models (LLMs) by contrasting the likelihoods of preferred and dispreferred responses. While effective at capturing relative preferences, these methods are widely observed to suppress…

Legal Passage Retrieval (LPR) systems are crucial as they help practitioners save time when drafting legal arguments. However, it remains an underexplored avenue. One primary reason is the significant vocabulary mismatch between the query…

Most existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems tend to overly rely on language bias and hence fail to reason from the visual clue. To address this issue, we propose a novel Language-Prior Feedback (LPF) objective function, to…