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Pairing a lexical retriever with a neural re-ranking model has set state-of-the-art performance on large-scale information retrieval datasets. This pipeline covers scenarios like question answering or navigational queries, however, for…

Modern retrieval systems do not rely on a single ranking model to construct their rankings. Instead, they generally take a cascading approach where a sequence of ranking models are applied in multiple re-ranking stages. Thereby, they…

Retrieve-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks have emerged as a promising solution to multi-hop question answering(QA) tasks since it enables large language models (LLMs) to incorporate external knowledge and mitigate their inherent…

Reinforcement learning (RL) based on the final answer's reward has driven recent progress in small language models (SLMs) on reasoning-heavy tasks such as math and code. However, applying the same techniques to retrieval-augmented…

Modern generative pre-trained language models excel at open-ended text generation, yet continue to underperform on structure-related tasks such as NER, relation extraction, and semantic role labeling, especially when compared to…

Knowledge-based Vision Question Answering (KB-VQA) systems address complex visual-grounded questions with knowledge retrieved from external knowledge bases. The tasks of knowledge retrieval and answer generation tasks both necessitate…

Financial analysts face significant challenges extracting information from lengthy 10-K reports, which often exceed 100 pages. This paper presents a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system designed to answer questions about S&P 500…

Performance of spoken language understanding (SLU) can be degraded with automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors. We propose a novel approach to improve SLU robustness by randomly corrupting clean training text with an ASR error simulator,…

Visual Question Answering (VQA) focuses on providing answers to natural language questions by utilizing information from images. Although cutting-edge multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4o achieve strong performance on VQA…

In this paper, we identify a critical problem, "lost-in-retrieval", in retrieval-augmented multi-hop question answering (QA): the key entities are missed in LLMs' sub-question decomposition. "Lost-in-retrieval" significantly degrades the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate incorrect or outdated information, especially in low-resource settings or when dealing with private data. To address this, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) uses external knowledge bases (KBs),…

Multi-hop retrieval is not a single-step relevance problem: later-hop evidence should be ranked by its utility conditioned on retrieved bridge evidence, not by similarity to the original query alone. We present BridgeRAG, a training-free,…

In simple open-domain question answering (QA), dense retrieval has become one of the standard approaches for retrieving the relevant passages to infer an answer. Recently, dense retrieval also achieved state-of-the-art results in multi-hop…

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is commonly used to boost the performance of traditional information retrieval (IR) models by using top-ranked documents to identify and weight new query terms, thereby reducing the effect of query-document…

Retrieval-augmented large language models, when optimized with outcome-level rewards, can achieve strong answer accuracy on multi-hop questions. However, under noisy retrieval, models frequently suffer from "right-answer-wrong-reason…

Multi-hop reasoning over financial disclosures is often a retrieval problem before it becomes a reasoning or generation problem: relevant facts are dispersed across sections, filings, companies, and years, and LLMs often expend excessive…

Speech-based open-domain question answering (QA over a large corpus of text passages with spoken questions) has emerged as an important task due to the increasing number of users interacting with QA systems via speech interfaces. Passage…

Few-shot learning for open domain multi-hop question answering typically relies on the incontext learning capability of large language models (LLMs). While powerful, these LLMs usually contain tens or hundreds of billions of parameters,…

Multi-task learning (MTL) is critical in real-world applications such as autonomous driving and robotics, enabling simultaneous handling of diverse tasks. However, obtaining fully annotated data for all tasks is impractical due to labeling…

This paper is concerned with the task of multi-hop open-domain Question Answering (QA). This task is particularly challenging since it requires the simultaneous performance of textual reasoning and efficient searching. We present a method…