Related papers: Ask Optimal Questions: Aligning Large Language Mod…

Conversational search supports multi-turn user-system interactions to solve complex information needs. Different from the traditional single-turn ad-hoc search, conversational search encounters a more challenging problem of…

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

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…

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)…

Instruction following (IF) is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs). However, handling complex instructions with multiple constraints remains challenging. Previous methods typically select preference pairs based on the…

Effective conversational search demands a deep understanding of user intent across multiple dialogue turns. Users frequently use abbreviations and shift topics in the middle of conversations, posing challenges for conventional retrievers.…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical for real-world deployment, yet existing methods like RLHF face computational and stability challenges. While DPO establishes an offline paradigm with single…

Preference alignment is pivotal for empowering large language models (LLMs) to generate helpful and harmless responses. However, the performance of preference alignment is highly sensitive to the prevalent noise in the preference data.…

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…

Retrieval augmentation is critical when Language Models (LMs) exploit non-parametric knowledge related to the query through external knowledge bases before reasoning. The retrieved information is incorporated into LMs as context alongside…

Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the stored knowledge in these models may inevitably be incomplete, out-of-date, or incorrect. This motivates the need to utilize…

We present ReFormeR, a pattern-guided approach for query reformulation. Instead of prompting a language model to generate reformulations of a query directly, ReFormeR first elicits short reformulation patterns from pairs of initial queries…

Many recent studies have shown the ability of large language models (LLMs) to achieve state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks, such as question answering, text summarization, coding, and translation. In some cases, the results…

Neural retrieval models excel in Web search, but their training requires substantial amounts of labeled query-document pairs, which are costly to obtain. With the widespread availability of Web document collections like ClueWeb22, synthetic…

Query rewrite, which aims to generate more efficient queries by altering a SQL query's structure without changing the query result, has been an important research problem. In order to maintain equivalence between the rewritten query and the…

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to elicit user preferences via natural dialogue to provide suitable item recommendations. However, current CRSs often deviate from realistic human interactions by rapidly recommending items in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with accuracy, domain-specific reasoning, and interpretability in vertical domains. Traditional preference alignment methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to set new standards in knowledge-intensive and complex reasoning tasks, yet their high computational demands limit widespread adoption. While distilling large models into smaller ones offers a…

In conversational search, the user's real search intent for the current turn is dependent on the previous conversation history. It is challenging to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context. To avoid the expensive…