16 accepted papers
With the growing adoption of large language model (LLM) agents in persistent, real-world roles, they naturally encounter continuous streams of tasks and interactions. A key limitation, however, is their failure to learn from this accumulated experience, forcing them to discard valuable insights and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with challenging, multi-step reasoning problems due to a fundamental learning gap -- Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) suffers from sparse rewards when correct solutions are rarely sampled, while Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) tends to ov…
Citation quality is crucial in information-seeking systems, directly influencing trust and the effectiveness of information access. Current evaluation frameworks, both human and automatic, mainly rely on Natural Language Inference (NLI) to assess binary or ternary supportiveness from cited sources,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in open-ended dialogue, yet their inability to retain and retrieve relevant information from long-term interactions limits their effectiveness in applications requiring sustained personalization. External memory mechanisms have been propose…
Reverse thinking plays a crucial role in human reasoning. Humans can reason not only from a problem to a solution but also in reverse, i.e., start from the solution and reason towards the problem. This often enhances overall reasoning performance as it enables consistency checks between their forwar…
Recent advances in knowledge distillation (KD) have enabled smaller student models to approach the performance of larger teacher models. However, popular methods such as supervised KD and on-policy KD, are adversely impacted by the knowledge gaps between teacher-student in practical scenarios. Super…
Modern language models (LMs) need to follow human instructions while being faithful; yet, they often fail to achieve both. Here, we provide concrete evidence of a trade-off between instruction following (i.e., follow open-ended instructions) and faithfulness (i.e., ground responses in given context)…
Question answering based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG-QA) is an important research topic in NLP and has a wide range of real-world applications. However, most existing datasets for this task are either constructed using a single source corpus or consist of short extractive answers, which f…
Commonsense reasoning is omnipresent in human communications and thus is an important feature for open-domain dialogue systems. However, evaluating commonsense in dialogue systems is still an open challenge. We take the first step by focusing on event commonsense that considers events and their rela…
Open-domain question answering (ODQA) is a crucial task in natural language processing. A typical ODQA system relies on a retriever module to select relevant contexts from a large corpus for a downstream reading comprehension model. Existing ODQA datasets consist mainly of Wikipedia corpus, and are…
Story visualization advances the traditional text-to-image generation by enabling multiple image generation based on a complete story. This task requires machines to 1) understand long text inputs, and 2) produce a globally consistent image sequence that illustrates the contents of the story. A key…
Stories or narratives are comprised of a sequence of events. To compose interesting stories, professional writers often leverage a creative writing technique called *flashback* that inserts past events into current storylines as we commonly observe in novels and plays. However, it is challenging for…
There has been a steady need in the medical community to precisely extract the temporal relations between clinical events. In particular, temporal information can facilitate a variety of downstream applications such as case report retrieval and medical question answering. Existing methods either req…
While pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved noticeable success on many NLP tasks, they still struggle for tasks that require event temporal reasoning, which is essential for event-centric applications. We present a continual pre-training approach that equips PTLMs with targeted knowledge…
Understanding how events are semantically related to each other is the essence of reading comprehension. Recent event-centric reading comprehension datasets focus mostly on event arguments or temporal relations. While these tasks partially evaluate machines’ ability of narrative understanding, human…
We present EventPlus, a temporal event understanding pipeline that integrates various state-of-the-art event understanding components including event trigger and type detection, event argument detection, event duration and temporal relation extraction. Event information, especially event temporal kn…