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The utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) in analytical tasks is rooted in their vast pre-trained knowledge, which allows them to interpret ambiguous inputs and infer missing information. However, this same capability introduces a…

Search engines increasingly leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate direct answers, and AI chatbots now access the Internet for fresh data. As information curators for billions of users, LLMs must assess the accuracy and…

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems predominantly rely on semantic relevance as a proxy for utility. However, this assumption collapses in realistic decision-making scenarios where user queries are laden with cognitive…

Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved multi-step reasoning through generating free-text rationales. However, recent studies show that LLMs tend to lose focus over the middle of long contexts. This raises…

Automatically generating human-readable text describing the functionality of a program is the intent of source code summarization. Although neural language models achieve significant performance in this field, they are limited by their…

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized machine learning and related fields, showcasing remarkable abilities in comprehending, generating, and manipulating human language. However, their conventional usage through…

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI is fundamentally transforming information retrieval and processing on the Internet, bringing both great potential and significant concerns regarding content authenticity and…

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to acquire new behaviors from the input sequence alone without any parameter updates. Recent studies have shown that ICL can surpass the original meaning learned in pretraining…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities. However, single-shot inference often yields unreliable results for complex reasoning tasks, leading researchers to explore multiple…

In this work, we analyze a pseudo-relevance retrieval method based on the results of web search engines. By enriching topics with text data from web search engine result pages and linked contents, we train topic-specific and cost-efficient…

Prompt-based probing has been widely used in evaluating the abilities of pretrained language models (PLMs). Unfortunately, recent studies have discovered such an evaluation may be inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable. Furthermore, the…

Despite the prevalence of retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs), the seamless integration of these models with retrieval mechanisms to enhance performance in document-based tasks remains challenging. While some post-retrieval…

Neural ranking models (NRMs) have become one of the most important techniques in information retrieval (IR). Due to the limitation of relevance labels, the training of NRMs heavily relies on negative sampling over unlabeled data. In general…

Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) that learns to rank documents with biased user feedback data is a well-known challenge in information retrieval. Existing methods in unbiased learning to rank typically rely on click modeling or inverse…

Topic relevance between query and document is a very important part of social search, which can evaluate the degree of matching between document and user's requirement. In most social search scenarios such as Dianping, modeling search…

The powerful generative abilities of large language models (LLMs) show potential in generating relevance labels for search applications. Previous work has found that directly asking about relevancy, such as ``How relevant is document A to…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on downstream tasks by in-context learning (ICL), which heavily relies on the quality of demonstrations selected from a large set of annotated examples. Recent works claim that…

According to common relevance-judgments regimes, such as TREC's, a document can be deemed relevant to a query even if it contains a very short passage of text with pertinent information. This fact has motivated work on passage-based…

Learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms are ubiquitous and necessary to explore the extensive catalogs of media providers. To avoid the user examining all the results, its preferences are used to provide a subset of relatively small size. The…

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their capacity to process long contexts. However, effectively utilizing this long context remains a challenge due to the issue of distraction, where irrelevant…