48 accepted papers
Agentic Web is an emerging paradigm where autonomous agents help users use online information. As the paradigm develops, content providers are also deploying agents to manage their data and serve it through controlled interfaces. This shift moves information access from centralized retrieval to dece…
Midtraining, the practice of mixing specialized data with more general pretraining data in an intermediate training phase, has become widespread in language model development, yet there is little understanding of what makes it effective. We propose that midtraining functions as distributional bridgi…
High-quality data is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) pretraining, yet its growth has not kept pace with the needs of frontier models. In this paper, we introduce RePro, a novel web recycling method that trains a relatively small LM with reinforcement learning to generate effective and fa…
We introduce Spectral Guidance, a framework for controlling diffusion models by leveraging the intrinsic geometry of the generative process. As data is progressively corrupted by noise, only a small number of features remain informative for control. We characterize them as the singular functions of …
By employing large language models (LLMs) to retrieve documents and generate natural language responses, Generative Engines, such as Google AI overview and ChatGPT, provide significantly enhanced user experiences and have rapidly become the new form of search. Their rapid adoption also drives the ne…
Web crawl is a main source of large language models’ (LLMs) pretraining data, but the majority of crawled web pages are discarded in pretraining due to low data quality. This paper presents Craw4LLM, an efficient web crawling method that explores the web graph based on the preference of LLM pretrain…
Data attribution methods quantify the influence of training data on model outputs and are becoming increasingly relevant for a wide range of LLM research and applications, including dataset curation, model interpretability, data valuation. However, there remain critical gaps in systematic LLM-centri…
Multimodal foundation models hold significant potential for automating radiology report generation, thereby assisting clinicians in diagnosing cardiac diseases. However, generated reports often suffer from serious factual inaccuracy. In this paper, we introduce a fact-aware multimodal retrieval-augm…
Training data is the backbone of large language models (LLMs), yet today’s data markets often operate under exploitative pricing -- sourcing data from marginalized groups with little pay or recognition. This paper introduces a theoretical framework for LLM data markets, modeling the strategic intera…
The efficiency and quality of language model pretraining are largely determined by the way pretraining data are selected. In this paper, we introduce *Group-MATES*, an efficient group-level data selection approach to optimize the speed-quality frontier of language model pretraining. Specifically, Gr…
Text-rich visual understanding—the ability to interpret both textual content and visual elements within a scene—is crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to effectively interact with structured environments. We propose leveraging webpage UIs as a naturally structured and diverse data s…
Dense embeddings deliver strong retrieval performance but often lack interpretability and controllability. This paper introduces a novel approach using sparse autoencoders (SAE) to interpret and control dense embeddings via the learned latent sparse features. Our key contribution is the development…
Synthetic data has been widely used to train large language models, but their generative nature inevitably introduces noisy, non-informative, and misleading learning signals. In this paper, we propose Montessori-Instruct, a novel data synthesis framework that tailors the data synthesis ability of th…
Recommender systems are among the most impactful AI applications, interacting with billions of users every day, guiding them to relevant products, services, or information tailored to their preferences. However, the research and development of recommender systems are hindered by existing datasets th…
Data attribution methods are used to measure the contribution of training data towards model outputs, and have several important applications in areas such as dataset curation and model interpretability. However, many standard data attribution methods, such as influence functions, utilize model grad…
Large language models (LLMs) integrated with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have improved factuality by grounding outputs in external evidence. However, they remain susceptible to unfaithful generation, where outputs contradict retrieved context despite its relevance and accuracy. Existing app…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven its effectiveness in mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving knowledge from external resources. To adapt LLMs for the RAG systems, current approaches use instruction tuning to optimize LLMs, improving their ability to ut…
Large language models (LLMs) excel across many natural language processing tasks but face challenges in domain-specific, analytical tasks such as conducting research surveys. This study introduces ResearchArena, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ capabilities in conducting academic surveys—a fou
Which large language model (LLM) is better? Every evaluation tells a story, but what do users really think about current LLMs? This paper presents CLUE, an LLM-powered interviewer that conducts in-the-moment user experience interviews, right after users interact with LLMs, and automatically gathers…
The web contains large-scale, diverse, and abundant information to satisfy the information-seeking needs of humans. Through meticulous data collection, preprocessing, and curation, webpages can be used as a fundamental data resource for language model pretraining. However, when confronted with the p…
This study investigates the existence of positional biases in Transformer-based language models for text representation learning, particularly in the context of web document retrieval. We build on previous research that demonstrated loss of information in the middle of input sequences for causal lan…
In the emergency department (ED), patients undergo triage and multiple laboratory tests before diagnosis. This time-consuming process causes ED crowding which impacts patient mortality, medical errors, staff burnout, etc. This work proposes (time) *cost-effective diagnostic assistance* that leverage…
Common document ranking pipelines in search systems are cascade systems that involve multiple ranking layers to integrate different information step-by-step. In this paper, we propose a novel re-ranker Fusion-in-T5 (FiT5), which integrates text matching information, ranking features, and global docu…
This paper proposes Multi-modAl Retrieval model via Visual modulE pLugin (MARVEL), which learns an embedding space for queries and multi-modal documents to conduct retrieval. MARVEL encodes queries and multi-modal documents with a unified encoder model, which helps to alleviate the modality gap betw…
Pretraining data selection has the potential to improve language model pretraining efficiency by utilizing higher-quality data from massive web data corpora. Current data selection methods, which rely on either hand-crafted rules or larger reference models, are conducted statically and do not captur…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) combines knowledge from domain-specific sources into large language models to ground answer generation. Current RAG systems lack customizable visibility on the context documents and the model’s attentiveness towards such documents. We propose RAGViz, a RAG diagno…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in utilizing tools, but their closed-source nature and high inference costs pose limitations on their adaptability, necessitating a valid method that leverages smaller, open-sourced models. In this paper, we introduce Toolink, a comp…
Retrieval augmentation can aid language models (LMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks by supplying them with external information. Prior works on retrieval augmentation usually jointly fine-tune the retriever and the LM, making them closely coupled. In this paper, we explore the scheme of generic retrie…
In this paper we improve the zero-shot generalization ability of language models via Mixture-Of-Memory Augmentation (MoMA), a mechanism that retrieves augmentation documents from multiple information corpora (external memories), with the option to ''plug in'' unseen memory at inference time. We deve…
How much success in Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) would translate into the performance enhancement in downstream tasks is an important question that has not been studied in depth. In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark, namely CompleQA, to comprehensively assess the influence of representa…
This paper explores the effectiveness of model-generated signals in improving zero-shot generalization of text-to-text Transformers such as T5. We study various designs to pretrain T5 using an auxiliary model to construct more challenging token replacements for the main model to denoise. Key aspects…
This paper presents Structure Aware Dense Retrieval (SANTA) model, which encodes user queries and structured data in one universal embedding space for retrieving structured data. SANTA proposes two pretraining methods to make language models structure-aware and learn effective representations for st…
This paper presents Universal Vision-Language Dense Retrieval (UniVL-DR), which builds a unified model for multi-modal retrieval. UniVL-DR encodes queries and multi-modality resources in an embedding space for searching candidates from different modalities. To learn a unified embedding space for mul…
We present a new zero-shot dense retrieval (ZeroDR) method, COCO-DR, to improve the generalization ability of dense retrieval by combating the distribution shifts between source training tasks and target scenarios. To mitigate the impact of document differences, COCO-DR continues pretraining the lan…
Dense retrievers encode queries and documents and map them in an embedding space using pre-trained language models. These embeddings need to be high-dimensional to fit training signals and guarantee the retrieval effectiveness of dense retrievers. However, these high-dimensional embeddings lead to l…
We present a new framework AMOS that pretrains text encoders with an Adversarial learning curriculum via a Mixture Of Signals from multiple auxiliary generators. Following ELECTRA-style pretraining, the main encoder is trained as a discriminator to detect replaced tokens generated by auxiliary maske…
In this paper, we investigate the instability in the standard dense retrieval training, which iterates between model training and hard negative selection using the being-trained model. We show the catastrophic forgetting phenomena behind the training instability, where models learn and forget differ…
Dense retrieval (DR) methods conduct text retrieval by first encoding texts in the embedding space and then matching them by nearest neighbor search. This requires strong locality properties from the representation space, e.g., close allocations of each small group of relevant texts, which are hard…
Conducting text retrieval in a learned dense representation space has many intriguing advantages. Yet dense retrieval (DR) often underperforms word-based sparse retrieval. In this paper, we first theoretically show the bottleneck of dense retrieval is the domination of uninformative negatives sample…
We present a self-supervised learning framework, COCO-LM, that pretrains Language Models by COrrecting and COntrasting corrupted text sequences. Following ELECTRA-style pretraining, COCO-LM employs an auxiliary language model to corrupt text sequences, upon which it constructs two new tasks for pret…
The progress in Query-focused Multi-Document Summarization (QMDS) has been limited by the lack of sufficient largescale high-quality training datasets. We present two QMDS training datasets, which we construct using two data augmentation methods: (1) transferring the commonly used single-document CN…
Open-domain question answering answers a question based on evidence retrieved from a large corpus. State-of-the-art neural approaches require intermediate evidence annotations for training. However, such intermediate annotations are expensive, and methods that rely on them cannot transfer to the mor…
The effectiveness of Neural Information Retrieval (Neu-IR) often depends on a large scale of in-domain relevance training signals, which are not always available in real-world ranking scenarios. To democratize the benefits of Neu-IR, this paper presents MetaAdaptRank, a domain adaptive learning meth…
Dense retrieval requires high-quality text sequence embeddings to support effective search in the representation space. Autoencoder-based language models are appealing in dense retrieval as they train the encoder to output high-quality embedding that can reconstruct the input texts. However, in this…
Complex question answering often requires finding a reasoning chain that consists of multiple evidence pieces. Current approaches incorporate the strengths of structured knowledge and unstructured text, assuming text corpora is semi-structured. Building on dense retrieval methods, we propose a new m…
Human conversations naturally evolve around different topics and fluently move between them. In research on dialog systems, the ability to actively and smoothly transition to new topics is often ignored. In this paper we introduce TIAGE, a new topic-shift aware dialog benchmark constructed utilizing…
Recently generating natural language explanations has shown very promising results in not only offering interpretable explanations but also providing additional information and supervision for prediction. However, existing approaches usually require a large set of human annotated explanations for tr…
Transformers have achieved new heights modeling natural language as a sequence of text tokens. However, in many real world scenarios, textual data inherently exhibits structures beyond a linear sequence such as trees and graphs; many tasks require reasoning with evidence scattered across multiple pi…