Related papers: An Early FIRST Reproduction and Improvements to Si…

Pretrained language models like BERT and T5 serve as crucial backbone encoders for dense retrieval. However, these models often exhibit limited generalization capabilities and face challenges in improving in domain accuracy. Recent research…

Multi-stage ranking pipelines have been a practical solution in modern search systems, where the first-stage retrieval is to return a subset of candidate documents, and latter stages attempt to re-rank those candidates. Unlike re-ranking…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in ranking systems such as information retrieval (IR) systems and recommender systems (RSs). To alleviate the latency of auto-regressive decoding, some studies explore the single (first)…

With the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have become mainstream to enhance LLMs' performance on complex tasks. However, LLMs…

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, leading to an expectation for LLMs to be trustworthy -- - both accurate and well-calibrated (the prediction confidence should align with its ground truth…

Recently, sequential recommendation has been adapted to the LLM paradigm to enjoy the power of LLMs. LLM-based methods usually formulate recommendation information into natural language and the model is trained to predict the next item in…

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with efficiency and scalability remains a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence research. This paper presents a rigorous experimental investigation into how…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) tasks using *first-token probability* (FTP), which selects the answer option whose initial token has the highest likelihood. While…

Large language models (LLMs) transcend passive generation and act as goal-directed agents by invoking external tools. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled framework for optimizing these emergent tool-use policies, yet the…

Context: Since it is well-established that developers spend a substantial portion of their time understanding source code, the ability to automatically identify algorithms within source code presents a valuable opportunity. This capability…

In information retrieval, training reranking models mainly focuses on two types of objectives: metric learning (e.g. contrastive loss to increase the predicted scores on relevant query-document pairs) and classification (binary label…

Large Language Models (LLMs) and pre-trained Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive success on many software engineering tasks (e.g., code completion and code generation). By leveraging huge existing code corpora (e.g., GitHub),…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable empirical success through scaling model and data size, pretraining has become increasingly critical yet computationally prohibitive, hindering rapid development. Despite the availability of…

The integration of slow-thinking mechanisms into large language models (LLMs) offers a promising way toward achieving Level 2 AGI Reasoners, as exemplified by systems like OpenAI's o1. However, several significant challenges remain,…

In neural Information Retrieval, ongoing research is directed towards improving the first retriever in ranking pipelines. Learning dense embeddings to conduct retrieval using efficient approximate nearest neighbors methods has proven to…

Fine tuning has been regarded as a de facto approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but the high training memory consumption inherited from LLMs makes this process inefficient. Among existing memory efficient…

When using LLMs to rank items based on given criteria, or evaluate answers, the order of candidate items can influence the model's final decision. This sensitivity to item positioning in a LLM's prompt is known as position bias. Prior…

Traditional post-training quantization (PTQ) is considered an effective approach to reduce model size and accelerate inference of large-scale language models (LLMs). However, existing low-rank PTQ methods require costly fine-tuning to…

The effectiveness of multi-stage text retrieval has been solidly demonstrated since before the era of pre-trained language models. However, most existing studies utilize models that predate recent advances in large language models (LLMs).…

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for chain-of-thought reasoning presents a significant challenge: supervised fine-tuning on a single "golden" rationale hurts generalization as it penalizes equally valid alternatives, whereas…