Related papers: ColBERT's [MASK]-based Query Augmentation: Effects…

We study serving retrieval models, specifically late interaction models like ColBERT, to many concurrent users at once and under a small budget, in which the index may not fit in memory. We present ColBERT-serve, a novel serving system that…

Masked language modeling (MLM) pre-training models such as BERT corrupt the input by replacing some tokens with [MASK] and then train a model to reconstruct the original tokens. This is an effective technique which has led to good results…

Although exact term match between queries and documents is the dominant method to perform first-stage retrieval, we propose a different approach, called RepBERT, to represent documents and queries with fixed-length contextualized…

We present MetricBERT, a BERT-based model that learns to embed text under a well-defined similarity metric while simultaneously adhering to the ``traditional'' masked-language task. We focus on downstream tasks of learning similarities for…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique has proven effective in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, the performance gains are inconsistent across different tasks, and the underlying…

Recent studies have shown that making a model spend more time thinking through longer Chain of Thoughts (CoTs) enables it to gain significant improvements in complex reasoning tasks. While current researches continue to explore the benefits…

We study the use of BERT for non-factoid question-answering, focusing on the passage re-ranking task under varying passage lengths. To this end, we explore the fine-tuning of BERT in different learning-to-rank setups, comprising both…

Eliciting "chain of thought" (CoT) rationales -- sequences of token that convey a "reasoning" process -- has been shown to consistently improve LLM performance on tasks like question answering. More recent efforts have shown that such…

Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) excel at knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external retrieval. However, they often over-search -- unnecessarily invoking search tool even when it does not improve response quality, which…

Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation are critical tasks for assessing the integration of language understanding and image comprehension, serving as benchmarks for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capabilities. To…

In recent years, large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks. However, their task effectiveness is heavily dependent on the prompting strategy used to elicit output, which can vary widely in both…

Query expansion is a widely used technique to improve the recall of search systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to query expansion that leverages the generative abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional query…

Unsupervised sentence representation learning aims to transform input sentences into fixed-length vectors enriched with intricate semantic information while obviating the reliance on labeled data. Recent strides within this domain have been…

Current dense retrievers are not robust to out-of-domain and outlier queries, i.e. their effectiveness on these queries is much poorer than what one would expect. In this paper, we consider a specific instance of such queries: queries that…

Recently, prompt tuning \cite{lester2021power} has gradually become a new paradigm for NLP, which only depends on the representation of the words by freezing the parameters of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to obtain remarkable…

Query expansion has been widely used to improve the search results of first-stage retrievers, yet its influence on second-stage, cross-encoder rankers remains under-explored. A recent work of Weller et al. [44] shows that current expansion…

Contextual ranking models based on BERT are now well established for a wide range of passage and document ranking tasks. However, the robustness of BERT-based ranking models under adversarial inputs is under-explored. In this paper, we…

This paper introduces a simple and scalable approach to improve the data efficiency of large language model (LLM) training by augmenting existing text data with thinking trajectories. The compute for pre-training LLMs has been growing at an…

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

BERT-based information retrieval models are expensive, in both time (query latency) and computational resources (energy, hardware cost), making many of these models impractical especially under resource constraints. The reliance on a query…