86 accepted papers
Beyond scratch coding, exploiting large-scale code repositories (e.g., GitHub) for practical tasks is vital in real-world software development, yet current benchmarks rarely evaluate code agents in such authentic, workflow-driven scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce GitTaskBench, a benchmark
Text representation plays a critical role in tasks like clustering, retrieval, and other downstream applications. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), there is increasing interest in harnessing their capabilities for this purpose. However, most of the LLMs are inherently causal and op
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models dramatically expand model capacity and achieve remarkable performance without increasing per-token compute. However, can MoEs surpass dense architectures under strictly equal resource constraints — that is, when the total parameter count, training compute, an…
Prevailing autoregressive (AR) models for text-to-image generation either rely on heavy, computationally-intensive diffusion models to process continuous image tokens, or employ vector quantization (VQ) to obtain discrete tokens with quantization loss. In this paper, we push the autoregressive parad…
We introduce the Perception Rubric Benchmark (PRB), a rubric-based evaluation framework for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that addresses the growing gap between benchmark scores and human-perceived quality. While standard perception metrics approach saturation, they produce compressed ran…
RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Current methods rely primarily on policy optimization frameworks like PPO and GRPO, which follow generalized policy iteration that alternates between evaluatin…
Recent advances in image editing models have shown remarkable progress. A common architectural design couples a multimodal large language model (MLLM) encoder with a diffusion decoder, as seen in systems such as Step1X-Edit and Qwen-Image-Edit, where the MLLM encodes both the reference image and the
Identity-consistent (ID-consistent) generation has become an important focus in text-to-image research, with recent models achieving notable success in producing images aligned with a reference identity. Yet, the scarcity of large-scale paired datasets—containing multiple images of the same individu…
Many studies focus on data annotation techniques for training effective PRMs. However, current methods encounter a significant issue when applied to long CoT reasoning processes: they tend to focus solely on the first incorrect step and all preceding steps, assuming that all subsequent steps are inc
With the rapid development of Large Vision Language Models, the focus of Graphical User Interface (GUI) agent tasks shifts from single-screen tasks to complex screen navigation challenges. However, real-world GUI environments, such as PC software and mobile Apps, are often complex and proprietary,…
KV Cache is commonly used to accelerate LLM inference with long contexts, yet its high memory demand drives the need for cache compression. Existing compression methods, however, are largely heuristic and lack dynamic budget allocation. To address this limitation, we introduce a unified framework fo
The remarkable reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) stems from cognitive behaviors that emerge through reinforcement with verifiable rewards. This work investigates how to transfer this principle to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to unlock advanced visual reasoning. We introduce a two-stage…
We introduce Open-Reasoner-Zero, the first open source implementation of large-scale reasoning-oriented RL training on the base model focusing on scalability, simplicity and accessibility. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that a minimalist approach, vanilla PPO with GAE ($\lambda=1$, $\…
Inspired by the success of DeepSeek-R1, we explore the potential of rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) in MLLM post-training for perception policy learning. While promising, our initial experiments reveal that incorporating a thinking process through RL does not consistently lead to performance…
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) is prohibitively expensive, creating a critical scaling gap where insights from small-scale experiments often fail to transfer to resource-intensive production systems, thereby hindering efficient innovation. To bridge this, we introduce Farseer, a novel and ref…
Recent advances in reasoning language models have witnessed a paradigm shift from short to long CoT pattern. Given the substantial computational cost of rollouts in long CoT models, maximizing the utility of fixed training datasets becomes crucial. Our analysis reveals that negative responses contai
To improve the performance of the dual-encoder retriever, one effective approach is knowledge distillation from the cross-encoder ranker. Existing works prepare training instances by pairing each query with one positive and a batch of negatives. However, most hard negatives mined by advanced dense r…
Long document retrieval aims to fetch query-relevant documents from a large-scale collection, where knowledge distillation has become de facto to improve a retriever by mimicking a heterogeneous yet powerful cross-encoder. However, in contrast to passages or sentences, retrieval on long documents su…
Recent large-scale vision-language pre-training depends on image-text global alignment by contrastive learning and is further boosted by fine-grained alignment in a weakly contrastive manner for cross-modal retrieval. Nonetheless, besides semantic matching learned by contrastive learning, cross-moda…
We propose a simple method that applies a large language model (LLM) to large-scale retrieval in zero-shot scenarios. Our method, the Large language model as Retriever (LameR), is built upon no other neural models but an LLM in a retrieval-augmented retrieval fashion, while breaking brute-force comb…
Information retrieval (IR) plays a crucial role in locating relevant resources from vast amounts of data, and its applications have evolved from traditional knowledge bases to modern retrieval models (RMs). The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has further revolutionized the IR field by enab…
Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs), such as StarCoder, have demonstrated remarkable performance in various code-related tasks. However, different from their counterparts in the general language modeling field, the technique of instruction fine-tuning remains relatively under-researched in this d…
Training large language models (LLMs) with open-domain instruction following data brings colossal success. However, manually creating such instruction data is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, humans may struggle to produce high-complexity instructions. In this paper, we show an ave…
Although great progress has been made for Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) in English, scaling out to a large number of languages remains a huge challenge due to the lack of large amounts of annotated training data in non-English languages. To address this challenge, some recent efforts of cross-…
Currently, learning better unsupervised sentence representations is the pursuit of many natural language processing communities. Lots of approaches based on pre-trained language models (PLMs) and contrastive learning have achieved promising results on this task. Experimentally, we observe that the o…
With the advance of large language models (LLMs), the research field of LLM applications becomes more and more popular and the idea of constructing pipelines to accomplish complex tasks by stacking LLM API calls come true. However, this kind of methods face two limitations: narrow information covera…
Establishing retrieval-based dialogue systems that can select appropriate responses from the pre-built index has gained increasing attention. Recent common practice is to construct a two-stage pipeline with a fast retriever (e.g., bi-encoder) for first-stage recall followed by a smart response reran…
Code execution is a fundamental aspect of programming language semantics that reflects the exact behavior of the code. However, most pre-trained models for code intelligence ignore the execution trace and only rely on source code and syntactic structures. In this paper, we investigate how well pre-t…
Previous entity disambiguation (ED) methods adopt a discriminative paradigm, where prediction is made based on matching scores between mention context and candidate entities using length-limited encoders. However, these methods often struggle to capture explicit discourse-level dependencies, result…
Document ranking aims at sorting a collection of documents with their relevance to a query. Contemporary methods explore more efficient transformers or divide long documents into passages to handle the long input. However, intensive query-irrelevant content may lead to harmful distraction and high q…
Recently, large-scale text retrieval has made impressive progress, facilitating both information retrieval and downstream knowledge-intensive tasks (e.g., open-domain QA and dialogue). With a moderate amount of data, a neural text retriever can outperform traditional methods such as BM25 by a large…
Generative approaches powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent abilities in tasks that require complex reasoning abilities. Yet the generative nature still makes the generated content suffer from hallucinations, thus unsuitable for entity-centric tasks like entity linking (…
Weakly-Supervised Video Grounding (WSVG) aims to localize events of interest in untrimmed videos with only video-level annotations. To date, most of the state-of-the-art WSVG methods follow a two-stage pipeline, i.e., firstly generating potential temporal proposals and then grounding with these prop…
This paper focuses on data augmentation for low-resource NLP tasks where the training set is limited. The existing solutions either leverage task-independent heuristic rules (e.g., Synonym Replacement) or fine-tune general-purpose pre-trained language models (e.g., GPT2) using the limited training i…
Image-text retrieval (ITR) aims to retrieve images or texts that match a query originating from the other modality. The conventional dense retrieval paradigm relies on encoding images and texts into dense representations with dual-stream encoders. However, this approach is limited by slow retrieval…
In large-scale retrieval, the lexicon-weighting paradigm, learning weighted sparse representations in vocabulary space, has shown promising results with high quality and low latency. Despite it deeply exploiting the lexicon-representing capability of pre-trained language models, a crucial gap remain…
Recently multi-lingual pre-trained language models (PLM) such as mBERT and XLM-R have achieved impressive strides in cross-lingual dense retrieval. Despite its successes, they are general-purpose PLM while the multilingual PLM tailored for cross-lingual retrieval is still unexplored. Motivated by an…
In this paper, we propose SimLM (Similarity matching with Language Model pre-training), a simple yet effective pre-training method for dense passage retrieval. It employs a simple bottleneck architecture that learns to compress the passage information into a dense vector through self-supervised pre-…
To present, multilingual language models trained using various pre-training tasks like mask language modeling (MLM) have yielded encouraging results on a wide range of downstream tasks. Despite the promising performances, structural knowledge in cross-lingual corpus is less explored in current works…
A neural ranker plays an indispensable role in the de facto ‘retrieval & rerank’ pipeline, but its training still lags behind due to the weak negative mining during contrastive learning. Compared to retrievers boosted by self-adversarial (i.e., in-distribution) negative mining, the ranker’s heavy st…
Web information extraction (WIE) is a fundamental problem in web document understanding, with a significant impact on various applications. Visual information plays a crucial role in WIE tasks as the nodes containing relevant information are often visually distinct, such as being in a larger font si…
Large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained language models (xPLMs) have shown effective in cross-lingual sequence labeling tasks (xSL), such as machine reading comprehension (xMRC) by transferring knowledge from a high-resource language to low-resource languages. Despite the great success, we draw an emp…
Generating new events given context with correlated ones plays a crucial role in many event-centric reasoning tasks. Existing works either limit their scope to specific scenarios or overlook event-level correlations. In this paper, we propose to pre-train a general Correlation-aware context-to-Event…
In this paper, we propose the CodeRetriever model, which learns the function-level code semantic representations through large-scale code-text contrastive pre-training. We adopt two contrastive learning schemes in CodeRetriever: unimodal contrastive learning and bimodal contrastive learning. For uni…
We study the problem of coarse-grained response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. The problem is equally important with fine-grained response selection, but is less explored in existing literature. In this paper, we propose a Contextual Fine-to-Coarse (CFC) distilled model for coarse-gr…
In monolingual dense retrieval, lots of works focus on how to distill knowledge from cross-encoder re-ranker to dual-encoder retriever and these methods achieve better performance due to the effectiveness of cross-encoder re-ranker. However, we find that the performance of the cross-encoder re-ranke…
Recently, various response generation models for two-party conversations have achieved impressive improvements, but less effort has been paid to multi-party conversations (MPCs) which are more practical and complicated. Compared with a two-party conversation where a dialogue context is a sequence of…
Despite the great success of spoken language understanding (SLU) in high-resource languages, it remains challenging in low-resource languages mainly due to the lack of labeled training data. The recent multilingual code-switching approach achieves better alignments of model representations across la…
Recent multilingual pre-trained models have shown better performance in various multilingual tasks. However, these models perform poorly on multilingual retrieval tasks due to lacking multilingual training data. In this paper, we propose to mine and generate self-supervised training data based on a…
Logical reasoning of text requires identifying critical logical structures in the text and performing inference over them. Existing methods for logical reasoning mainly focus on contextual semantics of text while struggling to explicitly model the logical inference process. In this paper, we not onl…
Retrieving evidences from tabular and textual resources is essential for open-domain question answering (OpenQA), which provides more comprehensive information. However, training an effective dense table-text retriever is difficult due to the challenges of table-text discrepancy and data sparsity pr…
Dense retrieval has achieved impressive advances in first-stage retrieval from a large-scale document collection, which is built on bi-encoder architecture to produce single vector representation of query and document. However, a document can usually answer multiple potential queries from different…
Responsing with image has been recognized as an important capability for an intelligent conversational agent. Yet existing works only focus on exploring the multimodal dialogue models which depend on retrieval-based methods, but neglecting generation methods. To fill in the gaps, we first present a…
"This paper presents a unified multimodal pre-trained model called NÃœWA that can generate new or manipulate existing visual data (i.e., image and video) for various visual synthesis tasks. To cover language, image, and video at the same time for different scenarios, a 3D transformer encoder-decoder…
Learning sentence embeddings in an unsupervised manner is fundamental in natural language processing. Recent common practice is to couple pre-trained language models with unsupervised contrastive learning, whose success relies on augmenting a sentence with a semantically-close positive instance to c…
This paper focuses on the Data Augmentation for low-resource Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. We propose Prompt-based Data Augmentation model (PromDA) which only trains small-scale Soft Prompt (i.e., a set of trainable vectors) in the frozen Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). This avoids…
Ethical judgment aims to determine if a person in a narrative situation acts under people’s social norms under a culture, so it is crucial to understand actions in narratives and achieve machine ethics. Recent works depend on data-driven methods to directly judge the ethics of complex real-world nar…
Code contrastive pre-training has recently achieved significant progress on code-related tasks. In this paper, we present SCodeR, a Soft-labeled contrastive pre-training framework with two positive sample construction methods to learn functional-level Code Representation. Considering the relevance b…
Current Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (KDG) models specialize in producing rational and factual responses. However, to establish long-term relationships with users, the KDG model needs the capability to generate responses in a desired style or attribute. Thus, we study a new problem: Styliz…
As more and more pre-trained language models adopt on-cloud deployment, the privacy issues grow quickly, mainly for the exposure of plain-text user data (e.g., search history, medical record, bank account). Privacy-preserving inference of transformer models is on the demand of cloud service users. T…
Generating natural and informative texts has been a long-standing problem in NLP. Much effort has been dedicated into incorporating pre-trained language models (PLMs) with various open-world knowledge, such as knowledge graphs or wiki pages. However, their ability to access and manipulate the task-s…
This work studies temporal reading comprehension (TRC), which reads a free-text passage and answers temporal ordering questions. Precise question understanding is critical for temporal reading comprehension. For example, the question “What happened before the victory” and “What happened after the vi…
Recent research demonstrates the effectiveness of using pretrained language models (PLM) to improve dense retrieval and multilingual dense retrieval. In this work, we present a simple but effective monolingual pretraining task called contrastive context prediction (CCP) to learn sentence representat…
Pre-training language models have achieved thriving success in numerous natural language understanding and autoregressive generation tasks, but non-autoregressive generation in applications such as machine translation has not sufficiently benefited from the pre-training paradigm. In this work, we es…
Building an intelligent dialogue system capable of naturally and coherently conversing with humans has been a long-standing goal of artificial intelligence. In the past decade, with the development of machine/deep learning technology and the explosive growth of available conversation data in social…
Finding codes given natural language query is beneficial to the productivity of software developers. Future progress towards better semantic matching between query and code requires richer supervised training resources. To remedy this, we introduce CoSQA dataset. It includes 20,604 labels for pairs…
Benchmark datasets have a significant impact on accelerating research in programming language tasks. In this paper, we introduce CodeXGLUE, a benchmark dataset to foster machine learning research for program understanding and generation. CodeXGLUE includes a collection of 10 tasks across 14 datasets…
Dancing to music is one of human's innate abilities since ancient times. In machine learning research, however, synthesizing dance movements from music is a challenging problem. Recently, researchers synthesize human motion sequences through autoregressive models like recurrent neural network (RNN).…
Pre-trained models for programming language have achieved dramatic empirical improvements on a variety of code-related tasks such as code search, code completion, code summarization, etc. However, existing pre-trained models regard a code snippet as a sequence of tokens, while ignoring the inherent…
Multilingual question answering over knowledge graph (KGQA) aims to derive answers from a knowledge graph (KG) for questions in multiple languages. To be widely applicable, we focus on its zero-shot transfer setting. That is, we can only access training data in a high-resource language, while need t…
We consider the problem of scaling automated suggested replies for a commercial email application to multiple languages. Faced with increased compute requirements and low language resources for language expansion, we build a single universal model for improving the quality and reducing run-time cost…
The task of Conversational Recommendation System (CRS), i.e., recommender dialog system, aims to recommend precise items to users through natural language interactions. Though recent end-to-end neural models have shown promising progress on this task, two key challenges still remain. First, the reco…
Building an intelligent dialogue system with the ability to select a proper response according to a multi-turn context is a great challenging task. Existing studies focus on building a context-response matching model with various neural architectures or pretrained language models (PLMs) and typicall…
Lack of training data presents a grand challenge to scaling out spoken language understanding (SLU) to low-resource languages. Although various data augmentation approaches have been proposed to synthesize training data in low-resource target languages, the augmented data sets are often noisy, and t…
Visual dialog is challenging since it needs to answer a series of coherent questions based on understanding the visual environment. How to ground related visual objects is one of the key problems. Previous studies utilize the question and history to attend to the image and achieve satisfactory perfo…
Recently, various neural models for multi-party conversation (MPC) have achieved impressive improvements on a variety of tasks such as addressee recognition, speaker identification and response prediction. However, these existing methods on MPC usually represent interlocutors and utterances individu…
Arguably, the visual perception of conversational agents to the physical world is a key way for them to exhibit the human-like intelligence. Image-grounded conversation is thus proposed to address this challenge. Existing works focus on exploring the multimodal dialog models that ground the conversa…
Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) neural text generation models, especially the pre-trained ones (e.g., BART and T5), have exhibited compelling performance on various natural language generation tasks. However, the black-box nature of these models limits their application in tasks where specific rules…
In recent years, world business in online discussions and opinion sharing on social media is booming. Re-entry prediction task is thus proposed to help people keep track of the discussions which they wish to continue. Nevertheless, existing works only focus on exploiting chatting history and context…
Procedural text understanding aims at tracking the states (e.g., create, move, destroy) and locations of the entities mentioned in a given paragraph. To effectively track the states and locations, it is essential to capture the rich semantic relations between entities, actions, and locations in the…
In natural language processing (NLP) tasks, slow inference speed and huge footprints in GPU usage remain the bottleneck of applying pre-trained deep models in production. As a popular method for model compression, knowledge distillation transfers knowledge from one or multiple large (teacher) models…
We study the problem of leveraging the syntactic structure of text to enhance pre-trained models such as BERT and RoBERTa. Existing methods utilize syntax of text either in the pre-training stage or in the fine-tuning stage, so that they suffer from discrepancy between the two stages. Such a problem…
Producing the embedding of a sentence in anunsupervised way is valuable to natural language matching and retrieval problems in practice. In this work, we conduct a thorough examination of pretrained model based unsupervised sentence embeddings. We study on fourpretrained models and conduct massive e…
The abundant semi-structured data on the Web, such as HTML-based tables and lists, provide commercial search engines a rich information source for question answering (QA). Different from plain text passages in Web documents, Web tables and lists have inherent structures, which carry semantic correla…
Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (CLMRC) remains a challenging problem due to the lack of large-scale annotated datasets in low-source languages, such as Arabic, Hindi, and Vietnamese. Many previous approaches use translation data by translating from a rich-source language, such as Englis…
Many algorithms for Knowledge-Based Question Answering (KBQA) depend on semantic parsing, which translates a question to its logical form. When only weak supervision is provided, it is usually necessary to search valid logical forms for model training. However, a complex question typically involves…