Related papers: CIRCLE: Multi-Turn Query Clarifications with Reinf…
Literature search is arguably one of the most important phases of the academic and non-academic research. The increase in the number of published papers each year makes manual search inefficient and furthermore insufficient. Hence,…
Generating effective query suggestions in conversational search requires aligning model outputs with user preferences, which is challenging due to sparse and noisy click signals. We propose GQS, a generative framework that integrates click…
While recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated cognitive behaviors through reinforcement learning, existing approaches struggle to invoke deep reasoning capabilities in multi-turn agents with long-horizon interactions. We…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems rely on retrieval models for identifying relevant contexts and answer generation models for utilizing those contexts. However, retrievers exhibit imperfect recall and precision, limiting…
User-machine interaction is crucial for information retrieval, especially for spoken content retrieval, because spoken content is difficult to browse, and speech recognition has a high degree of uncertainty. In interactive retrieval, the…
Robust deployment of large multimodal models (LMMs) in real-world scenarios requires access to external knowledge sources, given the complexity and dynamic nature of real-world information. Existing approaches such as retrieval-augmented…
Performing automatic reformulations of a user's query is a popular paradigm used in information retrieval (IR) for improving effectiveness -- as exemplified by the pseudo-relevance feedback approaches, which expand the query in order to…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made it possible for recommendation systems to interact with users in open-ended conversational interfaces. In order to personalize LLM responses, it is crucial to elicit user preferences, especially when…
While Reinforcement Learning ( RL) has made great strides towards solving increasingly complicated problems, many algorithms are still brittle to even slight environmental changes. Contextual Reinforcement Learning (cRL) provides a…
In real-world question-answering (QA) systems, ill-formed questions, such as wrong words, ill word order, and noisy expressions, are common and may prevent the QA systems from understanding and answering them accurately. In order to…
Query Understanding concerns about inferring the precise intent of search by the user with his formulated query, which is challenging because the queries are often very short and ambiguous. The report discusses the various kind of queries…
This paper investigates a new task named Conversational Question Generation (CQG) which is to generate a question based on a passage and a conversation history (i.e., previous turns of question-answer pairs). CQG is a crucial task for…
The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…
A significant amount of the world's knowledge is stored in relational databases. However, the ability for users to retrieve facts from a database is limited due to a lack of understanding of query languages such as SQL. We propose Seq2SQL,…
Real-world visual question answering (VQA) is often context-dependent: an image-question pair may be under-specified, such that the correct answer depends on external information that is not observable in the image. In such cases, directly…
Conversational search enables multi-turn interactions between users and systems to fulfill users' complex information needs. During this interaction, the system should understand the users' search intent within the conversational context…
Reinforcement learning (RL) requires skillful definition and remarkable computational efforts to solve optimization and control problems, which could impair its prospect. Introducing human guidance into reinforcement learning is a promising…
In web search, typically a candidate generation step selects a small set of documents---from collections containing as many as billions of web pages---that are subsequently ranked and pruned before being presented to the user. In Bing, the…
Efficiently acquiring external knowledge and up-to-date information is essential for effective reasoning and text generation in large language models (LLMs). Prompting advanced LLMs with reasoning capabilities to use search engines during…
In Knowledge Management, variations in information expressions have proven a real challenge. In particular, classical semantic relations (e.g. synonymy) do not connect words with different parts-of-speech. The method proposed tries to…