Related papers: Query Disambiguation via Answer-Free Context: Doub…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become an essential approach for extending the reasoning and knowledge capacity of large language models (LLMs). While prior research has primarily focused on retrieval quality and prompting…

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…

We study the ability of language models to reason about appropriate information disclosure - a central aspect of the evolving field of agentic privacy. Whereas previous works have focused on evaluating a model's ability to align with human…

Closed-book question answering (QA) requires a model to directly answer an open-domain question without access to any external knowledge. Prior work on closed-book QA either directly finetunes or prompts a pretrained language model (LM) to…

Query rewriting refers to an established family of approaches that are applied to underspecified and ambiguous queries to overcome the vocabulary mismatch problem in document ranking. Queries are typically rewritten during query processing…

Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have significantly improved performance in open-domain question answering (QA) by leveraging external knowledge. However, RALMs still struggle with unanswerable queries, where the retrieved…

The dependency between an adequate question formulation and correct answer selection is a very intriguing but still underexplored area. In this paper, we show that question rewriting (QR) of the conversational context allows to shed more…

When pre-trained on large unsupervised textual corpora, language models are able to store and retrieve factual knowledge to some extent, making it possible to use them directly for zero-shot cloze-style question answering. However, storing…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable success in open-book question answering (QA), where the task requires generating answers grounded in a provided external context. A critical challenge in open-book QA is to ensure…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding generation in external, non-parametric knowledge. However, when a task requires choosing among competing options, simply grounding generation in broadly…

Language model users often issue queries that lack specification, where the context under which a query was issued -- such as the user's identity, the query's intent, and the criteria for a response to be useful -- is not explicit. For…

Retrieval-augmented language models have demonstrated performance comparable to much larger models while requiring fewer computational resources. The effectiveness of these models crucially depends on the overlap between query and retrieved…

Users often assume that large language models (LLMs) share their cognitive alignment of context and intent, leading them to omit critical information in question-answering (QA) and produce ambiguous queries. Responses based on misaligned…

Fine-tuning a language model often results in a degradation of its existing performance on other tasks, due to a shift in the model parameters; this phenomenon is often referred to as (catastrophic) forgetting. We are interested in…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances factual grounding in large language models (LLMs) by incorporating retrieved evidence, but LLM accuracy declines when long or noisy contexts exceed the model's effective attention span. Existing…

The ability to acquire latent semantics is one of the key properties that determines the performance of language models. One convenient approach to invoke this ability is to prepend metadata (e.g. URLs, domains, and styles) at the beginning…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved, query rewriting has been widely incorporated into the RAG system for downstream tasks like open-domain QA. Many works have attempted to…

Augmenting LLMs with context leads to improved performance across many applications. Despite much research on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, an open question is whether errors arise because LLMs fail to utilize the context…

When people answer questions about a specific situation, e.g., "I cheated on my mid-term exam last week. Was that wrong?", cognitive science suggests that they form a mental picture of that situation before answering. While we do not know…

The Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework utilizes a combination of parametric knowledge and external knowledge to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on open-domain question answering tasks. However, the RAG framework suffers…