Daily Papers

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has showcased their efficacy across various domains, yet they often hallucinate, especially in knowledge-intensive tasks that require external knowledge sources. To improve factual accuracy of language models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a popular solution. However, traditional retrieval modules often rely on large-scale document indexes, which can be disconnected from generative tasks. Through generative retrieval (GR) approach, language models can achieve superior retrieval performance by directly generating relevant document identifiers (DocIDs). However, the relationship between GR and downstream tasks, as well as the potential of LLMs in GR, remains unexplored. In this paper, we present a unified language model that utilizes external corpus to handle various knowledge-intensive tasks by seamlessly integrating generative retrieval, closed-book generation, and RAG. In order to achieve effective retrieval and generation through a unified continuous decoding process, we introduce the following mechanisms: (1) a ranking-oriented DocID decoding strategy, which improves ranking ability by directly learning from a DocID ranking list; (2) a continuous generation strategy to facilitate effective and efficient RAG; (3) well-designed auxiliary DocID understanding tasks to enhance the model's comprehension of DocIDs and their relevance to downstream tasks. Our approach is evaluated on the widely used KILT benchmark using two variants of backbone models: an encoder-decoder T5 model and a decoder-only LLM, Llama2. Experimental results showcase the superior performance of our models in both retrieval and downstream knowledge-intensive tasks.

We study the problem of completing various visual document understanding (VDU) tasks, e.g., question answering and information extraction, on real-world documents through human-written instructions. To this end, we propose InstructDoc, the first large-scale collection of 30 publicly available VDU datasets, each with diverse instructions in a unified format, which covers a wide range of 12 tasks and includes open document types/formats. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization performance on VDU tasks, we design a new instruction-based document reading and understanding model, InstructDr, that connects document images, image encoders, and large language models (LLMs) through a trainable bridging module. Experiments demonstrate that InstructDr can effectively adapt to new VDU datasets, tasks, and domains via given instructions and outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and ChatGPT without specific training.

Existing models for extractive summarization are usually trained from scratch with a cross-entropy loss, which does not explicitly capture the global context at the document level. In this paper, we aim to improve this task by introducing three auxiliary pre-training tasks that learn to capture the document-level context in a self-supervised fashion. Experiments on the widely-used CNN/DM dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed auxiliary tasks. Furthermore, we show that after pre-training, a clean model with simple building blocks is able to outperform previous state-of-the-art that are carefully designed.

This paper summarizes our contributions to the document-grounded dialog tasks at the 9th and 10th Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC9 and DSTC10). In both iterations the task consists of three subtasks: first detect whether the current turn is knowledge seeking, second select a relevant knowledge document, and third generate a response grounded on the selected document. For DSTC9 we proposed different approaches to make the selection task more efficient. The best method, Hierarchical Selection, actually improves the results compared to the original baseline and gives a speedup of 24x. In the DSTC10 iteration of the task, the challenge was to adapt systems trained on written dialogs to perform well on noisy automatic speech recognition transcripts. Therefore, we proposed data augmentation techniques to increase the robustness of the models as well as methods to adapt the style of generated responses to fit well into the proceeding dialog. Additionally, we proposed a noisy channel model that allows for increasing the factuality of the generated responses. In addition to summarizing our previous contributions, in this work, we also report on a few small improvements and reconsider the automatic evaluation metrics for the generation task which have shown a low correlation to human judgments.

This work presents DocPedia, a novel large multimodal model (LMM) for versatile OCR-free document understanding, capable of parsing images up to 2,560times2,560 resolution. Unlike existing work either struggle with high-resolution documents or give up the large language model thus vision or language ability constrained, our DocPedia directly processes visual input in the frequency domain rather than the pixel space. The unique characteristic enables DocPedia to capture a greater amount of visual and textual information using a limited number of visual tokens. To consistently enhance both perception and comprehension abilities of our model, we develop a dual-stage training strategy and enrich instructions/annotations of all training tasks covering multiple document types. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on various publicly available benchmarks confirm the mutual benefits of jointly learning perception and comprehension tasks. The results provide further evidence of the effectiveness and superior performance of our DocPedia over other methods.

The use of visually-rich documents (VRDs) in various fields has created a demand for Document AI models that can read and comprehend documents like humans, which requires the overcoming of technical, linguistic, and cognitive barriers. Unfortunately, the lack of appropriate datasets has significantly hindered advancements in the field. To address this issue, we introduce DocTrack, a VRD dataset really aligned with human eye-movement information using eye-tracking technology. This dataset can be used to investigate the challenges mentioned above. Additionally, we explore the impact of human reading order on document understanding tasks and examine what would happen if a machine reads in the same order as a human. Our results suggest that although Document AI models have made significant progress, they still have a long way to go before they can read VRDs as accurately, continuously, and flexibly as humans do. These findings have potential implications for future research and development of Document AI models. The data is available at https://github.com/hint-lab/doctrack.

Recently, the advent of Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) has received increasing attention across various domains, particularly in the field of visual document understanding (VDU). Different from conventional vision-language tasks, VDU is specifically concerned with text-rich scenarios containing abundant document elements. Nevertheless, the importance of fine-grained features remains largely unexplored within the community of LVLMs, leading to suboptimal performance in text-rich scenarios. In this paper, we abbreviate it as the fine-grained feature collapse issue. With the aim of filling this gap, we propose a contrastive learning framework, termed Document Object COntrastive learning (DoCo), specifically tailored for the downstream tasks of VDU. DoCo leverages an auxiliary multimodal encoder to obtain the features of document objects and align them to the visual features generated by the vision encoder of LVLM, which enhances visual representation in text-rich scenarios. It can represent that the contrastive learning between the visual holistic representations and the multimodal fine-grained features of document objects can assist the vision encoder in acquiring more effective visual cues, thereby enhancing the comprehension of text-rich documents in LVLMs. We also demonstrate that the proposed DoCo serves as a plug-and-play pre-training method, which can be employed in the pre-training of various LVLMs without inducing any increase in computational complexity during the inference process. Extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks of VDU reveal that LVLMs equipped with our proposed DoCo can achieve superior performance and mitigate the gap between VDU and generic vision-language tasks.

This paper introduces Doc2Bot, a novel dataset for building machines that help users seek information via conversations. This is of particular interest for companies and organizations that own a large number of manuals or instruction books. Despite its potential, the nature of our task poses several challenges: (1) documents contain various structures that hinder the ability of machines to comprehend, and (2) user information needs are often underspecified. Compared to prior datasets that either focus on a single structural type or overlook the role of questioning to uncover user needs, the Doc2Bot dataset is developed to target such challenges systematically. Our dataset contains over 100,000 turns based on Chinese documents from five domains, larger than any prior document-grounded dialog dataset for information seeking. We propose three tasks in Doc2Bot: (1) dialog state tracking to track user intentions, (2) dialog policy learning to plan system actions and contents, and (3) response generation which generates responses based on the outputs of the dialog policy. Baseline methods based on the latest deep learning models are presented, indicating that our proposed tasks are challenging and worthy of further research.

In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially. There is a need for developing NLP-based techniques for processing and automatically understanding legal documents. To promote research in the area of Legal NLP we organized the shared task LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts at SemEval 2023. LegalEval task has three sub-tasks: Task-A (Rhetorical Roles Labeling) is about automatically structuring legal documents into semantically coherent units, Task-B (Legal Named Entity Recognition) deals with identifying relevant entities in a legal document and Task-C (Court Judgement Prediction with Explanation) explores the possibility of automatically predicting the outcome of a legal case along with providing an explanation for the prediction. In total 26 teams (approx. 100 participants spread across the world) submitted systems paper. In each of the sub-tasks, the proposed systems outperformed the baselines; however, there is a lot of scope for improvement. This paper describes the tasks, and analyzes techniques proposed by various teams.

Multilingual pre-trained models could leverage the training data from a rich source language (such as English) to improve performance on low resource languages. However, the transfer quality for multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is significantly worse than sentence classification tasks mainly due to the requirement of MRC to detect the word level answer boundary. In this paper, we propose two auxiliary tasks in the fine-tuning stage to create additional phrase boundary supervision: (1) A mixed MRC task, which translates the question or passage to other languages and builds cross-lingual question-passage pairs; (2) A language-agnostic knowledge masking task by leveraging knowledge phrases mined from web. Besides, extensive experiments on two cross-lingual MRC datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Current tasks and methods in Document Understanding aims to process documents as single elements. However, documents are usually organized in collections (historical records, purchase invoices), that provide context useful for their interpretation. To address this problem, we introduce Document Collection Visual Question Answering (DocCVQA) a new dataset and related task, where questions are posed over a whole collection of document images and the goal is not only to provide the answer to the given question, but also to retrieve the set of documents that contain the information needed to infer the answer. Along with the dataset we propose a new evaluation metric and baselines which provide further insights to the new dataset and task.

Reliable slot and intent detection (SID) is crucial in natural language understanding for applications like digital assistants. Encoder-only transformer models fine-tuned on high-resource languages generally perform well on SID. However, they struggle with dialectal data, where no standardized form exists and training data is scarce and costly to produce. We explore zero-shot transfer learning for SID, focusing on multiple Bavarian dialects, for which we release a new dataset for the Munich dialect. We evaluate models trained on auxiliary tasks in Bavarian, and compare joint multi-task learning with intermediate-task training. We also compare three types of auxiliary tasks: token-level syntactic tasks, named entity recognition (NER), and language modelling. We find that the included auxiliary tasks have a more positive effect on slot filling than intent classification (with NER having the most positive effect), and that intermediate-task training yields more consistent performance gains. Our best-performing approach improves intent classification performance on Bavarian dialects by 5.1 and slot filling F1 by 8.4 percentage points.

We call on the Document AI (DocAI) community to reevaluate current methodologies and embrace the challenge of creating more practically-oriented benchmarks. Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE) seeks to remediate the halted research progress in understanding visually-rich documents (VRDs). We present a new dataset with novelties related to types of questions, answers, and document layouts based on multi-industry, multi-domain, and multi-page VRDs of various origins, and dates. Moreover, we are pushing the boundaries of current methods by creating multi-task and multi-domain evaluation setups that more accurately simulate real-world situations where powerful generalization and adaptation under low-resource settings are desired. DUDE aims to set a new standard as a more practical, long-standing benchmark for the community, and we hope that it will lead to future extensions and contributions that address real-world challenges. Finally, our work illustrates the importance of finding more efficient ways to model language, images, and layout in DocAI.

Acronyms are the short forms of longer phrases and they are frequently used in writing, especially scholarly writing, to save space and facilitate the communication of information. As such, every text understanding tool should be capable of recognizing acronyms in text (i.e., acronym identification) and also finding their correct meaning (i.e., acronym disambiguation). As most of the prior works on these tasks are restricted to the biomedical domain and use unsupervised methods or models trained on limited datasets, they fail to perform well for scientific document understanding. To push forward research in this direction, we have organized two shared task for acronym identification and acronym disambiguation in scientific documents, named AI@SDU and AD@SDU, respectively. The two shared tasks have attracted 52 and 43 participants, respectively. While the submitted systems make substantial improvements compared to the existing baselines, there are still far from the human-level performance. This paper reviews the two shared tasks and the prominent participating systems for each of them.

Reading comprehension (RC)---in contrast to information retrieval---requires integrating information and reasoning about events, entities, and their relations across a full document. Question answering is conventionally used to assess RC ability, in both artificial agents and children learning to read. However, existing RC datasets and tasks are dominated by questions that can be solved by selecting answers using superficial information (e.g., local context similarity or global term frequency); they thus fail to test for the essential integrative aspect of RC. To encourage progress on deeper comprehension of language, we present a new dataset and set of tasks in which the reader must answer questions about stories by reading entire books or movie scripts. These tasks are designed so that successfully answering their questions requires understanding the underlying narrative rather than relying on shallow pattern matching or salience. We show that although humans solve the tasks easily, standard RC models struggle on the tasks presented here. We provide an analysis of the dataset and the challenges it presents.

One long-term goal of machine learning research is to produce methods that are applicable to reasoning and natural language, in particular building an intelligent dialogue agent. To measure progress towards that goal, we argue for the usefulness of a set of proxy tasks that evaluate reading comprehension via question answering. Our tasks measure understanding in several ways: whether a system is able to answer questions via chaining facts, simple induction, deduction and many more. The tasks are designed to be prerequisites for any system that aims to be capable of conversing with a human. We believe many existing learning systems can currently not solve them, and hence our aim is to classify these tasks into skill sets, so that researchers can identify (and then rectify) the failings of their systems. We also extend and improve the recently introduced Memory Networks model, and show it is able to solve some, but not all, of the tasks.

LLMs cannot reliably recognize their parametric knowledge boundaries and often hallucinate answers to outside-of-boundary questions. In contrast, humans recognize their limitations and can either seek external help for such questions or abstain. In this paper, we introduce MASH (Modeling Abstention via Selective Help-seeking), a training framework that readily extracts abstentions from LLMs. Our key idea is that any external help-seeking by an LLM, i.e. search tool use, can serve as a proxy for abstention if the external help (search) is appropriately penalized while simultaneously rewarding answer accuracy. MASH operationalizes this idea using reinforcement learning with a pay-per-search reward. We run experiments on three knowledge-intensive QA datasets. Our results show that MASH substantially improves upon the selective help-seeking performance of prior efficient search approaches; on multi-hop datasets, MASH improves answer accuracy by 7.6%. Furthermore, MASH demonstrates strong off-the-shelf abstention -- it can distinguish between unanswerable/answerable questions and selectively generate responses for answerable questions -- showcasing behavior analogous to specialized abstention approaches. We emphasize that contrary to prior abstention methods, MASH does not require pre-determining knowledge boundaries to construct training data. Instead, MASH's abstentions are a by-product of training for the auxiliary selective help-seeking task. Overall, we show that MASH training effectively aligns search tool use with parametric knowledge, which can be successfully leveraged for making abstention decisions.

This paper summarizes our entries to both subtasks of the first DialDoc shared task which focuses on the agent response prediction task in goal-oriented document-grounded dialogs. The task is split into two subtasks: predicting a span in a document that grounds an agent turn and generating an agent response based on a dialog and grounding document. In the first subtask, we restrict the set of valid spans to the ones defined in the dataset, use a biaffine classifier to model spans, and finally use an ensemble of different models. For the second subtask, we use a cascaded model which grounds the response prediction on the predicted span instead of the full document. With these approaches, we obtain significant improvements in both subtasks compared to the baseline.

We present DocFormer -- a multi-modal transformer based architecture for the task of Visual Document Understanding (VDU). VDU is a challenging problem which aims to understand documents in their varied formats (forms, receipts etc.) and layouts. In addition, DocFormer is pre-trained in an unsupervised fashion using carefully designed tasks which encourage multi-modal interaction. DocFormer uses text, vision and spatial features and combines them using a novel multi-modal self-attention layer. DocFormer also shares learned spatial embeddings across modalities which makes it easy for the model to correlate text to visual tokens and vice versa. DocFormer is evaluated on 4 different datasets each with strong baselines. DocFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on all of them, sometimes beating models 4x its size (in no. of parameters).

Documents are a core part of many businesses in many fields such as law, finance, and technology among others. Automatic understanding of documents such as invoices, contracts, and resumes is lucrative, opening up many new avenues of business. The fields of natural language processing and computer vision have seen tremendous progress through the development of deep learning such that these methods have started to become infused in contemporary document understanding systems. In this survey paper, we review different techniques for document understanding for documents written in English and consolidate methodologies present in literature to act as a jumping-off point for researchers exploring this area.

Document Question Answering (DocQA) focuses on answering questions grounded in given documents, yet existing DocQA agents lack effective tool utilization and largely rely on closed-source models. In this work, we introduce DocDancer, an end-to-end trained open-source Doc agent. We formulate DocQA as an information-seeking problem and propose a tool-driven agent framework that explicitly models document exploration and comprehension. To enable end-to-end training of such agents, we introduce an Exploration-then-Synthesis data synthesis pipeline that addresses the scarcity of high-quality training data for DocQA. Training on the synthesized data, the trained models on two long-context document understanding benchmarks, MMLongBench-Doc and DocBench, show their effectiveness. Further analysis provides valuable insights for the agentic tool design and synthetic data.

The advent of multimodal learning has brought a significant improvement in document AI. Documents are now treated as multimodal entities, incorporating both textual and visual information for downstream analysis. However, works in this space are often focused on the textual aspect, using the visual space as auxiliary information. While some works have explored pure vision based techniques for document image understanding, they require OCR identified text as input during inference, or do not align with text in their learning procedure. Therefore, we present a novel image-text alignment technique specially designed for leveraging the textual information in document images to improve performance on visual tasks. Our document encoder model DoPTA - trained with this technique demonstrates strong performance on a wide range of document image understanding tasks, without requiring OCR during inference. Combined with an auxiliary reconstruction objective, DoPTA consistently outperforms larger models, while using significantly lesser pre-training compute. DoPTA also sets new state-of-the art results on D4LA, and FUNSD, two challenging document visual analysis benchmarks.

Enabling a computer to understand a document so that it can answer comprehension questions is a central, yet unsolved goal of NLP. A key factor impeding its solution by machine learned systems is the limited availability of human-annotated data. Hermann et al. (2015) seek to solve this problem by creating over a million training examples by pairing CNN and Daily Mail news articles with their summarized bullet points, and show that a neural network can then be trained to give good performance on this task. In this paper, we conduct a thorough examination of this new reading comprehension task. Our primary aim is to understand what depth of language understanding is required to do well on this task. We approach this from one side by doing a careful hand-analysis of a small subset of the problems and from the other by showing that simple, carefully designed systems can obtain accuracies of 73.6% and 76.6% on these two datasets, exceeding current state-of-the-art results by 7-10% and approaching what we believe is the ceiling for performance on this task.

Natural language inference (NLI) is formulated as a unified framework for solving various NLP problems such as relation extraction, question answering, summarization, etc. It has been studied intensively in the past few years thanks to the availability of large-scale labeled datasets. However, most existing studies focus on merely sentence-level inference, which limits the scope of NLI's application in downstream NLP problems. This work presents DocNLI -- a newly-constructed large-scale dataset for document-level NLI. DocNLI is transformed from a broad range of NLP problems and covers multiple genres of text. The premises always stay in the document granularity, whereas the hypotheses vary in length from single sentences to passages with hundreds of words. Additionally, DocNLI has pretty limited artifacts which unfortunately widely exist in some popular sentence-level NLI datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that, even without fine-tuning, a model pretrained on DocNLI shows promising performance on popular sentence-level benchmarks, and generalizes well to out-of-domain NLP tasks that rely on inference at document granularity. Task-specific fine-tuning can bring further improvements. Data, code, and pretrained models can be found at https://github.com/salesforce/DocNLI.

We propose MultiDoc2Dial, a new task and dataset on modeling goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. Most previous works treat document-grounded dialogue modeling as a machine reading comprehension task based on a single given document or passage. In this work, we aim to address more realistic scenarios where a goal-oriented information-seeking conversation involves multiple topics, and hence is grounded on different documents. To facilitate such a task, we introduce a new dataset that contains dialogues grounded in multiple documents from four different domains. We also explore modeling the dialogue-based and document-based context in the dataset. We present strong baseline approaches and various experimental results, aiming to support further research efforts on such a task.

This paper presents our submitted system to SemEval 2021 Task 4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning. Our system uses a large pre-trained language model as the encoder and an additional dual multi-head co-attention layer to strengthen the relationship between passages and question-answer pairs, following the current state-of-the-art model DUMA. The main difference is that we stack the passage-question and question-passage attention modules instead of calculating parallelly to simulate re-considering process. We also add a layer normalization module to improve the performance of our model. Furthermore, to incorporate our known knowledge about abstract concepts, we retrieve the definitions of candidate answers from WordNet and feed them to the model as extra inputs. Our system, called WordNet-enhanced DUal Multi-head Co-Attention (WN-DUMA), achieves 86.67% and 89.99% accuracy on the official blind test set of subtask 1 and subtask 2 respectively.

Query understanding is a fundamental problem in information retrieval (IR), which has attracted continuous attention through the past decades. Many different tasks have been proposed for understanding users' search queries, e.g., query classification or query clustering. However, it is not that precise to understand a search query at the intent class/cluster level due to the loss of many detailed information. As we may find in many benchmark datasets, e.g., TREC and SemEval, queries are often associated with a detailed description provided by human annotators which clearly describes its intent to help evaluate the relevance of the documents. If a system could automatically generate a detailed and precise intent description for a search query, like human annotators, that would indicate much better query understanding has been achieved. In this paper, therefore, we propose a novel Query-to-Intent-Description (Q2ID) task for query understanding. Unlike those existing ranking tasks which leverage the query and its description to compute the relevance of documents, Q2ID is a reverse task which aims to generate a natural language intent description based on both relevant and irrelevant documents of a given query. To address this new task, we propose a novel Contrastive Generation model, namely CtrsGen for short, to generate the intent description by contrasting the relevant documents with the irrelevant documents given a query. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by comparing with several state-of-the-art generation models on the Q2ID task. We discuss the potential usage of such Q2ID technique through an example application.

The adoption of pre-trained language models in task-oriented dialogue systems has resulted in significant enhancements of their text generation abilities. However, these architectures are slow to use because of the large number of trainable parameters and can sometimes fail to generate diverse responses. To address these limitations, we propose two models with auxiliary tasks for response selection - (1) distinguishing distractors from ground truth responses and (2) distinguishing synthetic responses from ground truth labels. They achieve state-of-the-art results on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset with combined scores of 107.5 and 108.3 and outperform a baseline with three times more parameters. We publish reproducible code and checkpoints and discuss the effects of applying auxiliary tasks to T5-based architectures.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in document understanding. However, their reasoning processes remain largely black-box, making it difficult to ensure reliability and trustworthiness, especially in high-stakes domains such as legal, financial, and medical document analysis. Existing methods use fixed Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) but suffer from catastrophic forgetting, poor adaptability, and limited generalization across domain tasks. In this paper, we propose DocThinker, a rule-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for dynamic inference-time reasoning. Instead of relying on static CoT templates, DocThinker autonomously refines reasoning strategies via policy learning, generating explainable intermediate results, including structured reasoning processes, rephrased questions, regions of interest (RoI) supporting the answer, and the final answer. By integrating multi-objective rule-based rewards and KL-constrained optimization, our method mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enhances both adaptability and transparency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DocThinker significantly improves generalization while producing more explainable and human-understandable reasoning steps. Our findings highlight RL as a powerful alternative for enhancing explainability and adaptability in MLLM-based document understanding. Code will be available at https://github.com/wenwenyu/DocThinker.

Visual Document Understanding has become essential with the increase of text-rich visual content. This field poses significant challenges due to the need for effective integration of visual perception and textual comprehension, particularly across diverse document types with complex layouts. Moreover, existing fine-tuning datasets for this domain often fall short in providing the detailed contextual information for robust understanding, leading to hallucinations and limited comprehension of spatial relationships among visual elements. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative pipeline that utilizes adaptive generation of markup languages, such as Markdown, JSON, HTML, and TiKZ, to build highly structured document representations and deliver contextually-grounded responses. We introduce two fine-grained structured datasets: DocMark-Pile, comprising approximately 3.8M pretraining data pairs for document parsing, and DocMark-Instruct, featuring 624k fine-tuning data annotations for grounded instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing state-of-theart MLLMs across a range of visual document understanding benchmarks, facilitating advanced reasoning and comprehension capabilities in complex visual scenarios. Our code and models are released at https://github. com/Euphoria16/DocMark.

Learning with auxiliary tasks can improve the ability of a primary task to generalise. However, this comes at the cost of manually labelling auxiliary data. We propose a new method which automatically learns appropriate labels for an auxiliary task, such that any supervised learning task can be improved without requiring access to any further data. The approach is to train two neural networks: a label-generation network to predict the auxiliary labels, and a multi-task network to train the primary task alongside the auxiliary task. The loss for the label-generation network incorporates the loss of the multi-task network, and so this interaction between the two networks can be seen as a form of meta learning with a double gradient. We show that our proposed method, Meta AuXiliary Learning (MAXL), outperforms single-task learning on 7 image datasets, without requiring any additional data. We also show that MAXL outperforms several other baselines for generating auxiliary labels, and is even competitive when compared with human-defined auxiliary labels. The self-supervised nature of our method leads to a promising new direction towards automated generalisation. Source code can be found at https://github.com/lorenmt/maxl.

When completing knowledge-intensive tasks, humans sometimes need not just an answer but also a corresponding reference passage for auxiliary reading. Previous methods required obtaining pre-segmented article chunks through additional retrieval models. This paper explores leveraging the parameterized knowledge stored during the pre-training phase of large language models (LLMs) to independently recall reference passage from any starting position. We propose a two-stage framework that simulates the scenario of humans recalling easily forgotten references. Initially, the LLM is prompted to recall document title identifiers to obtain a coarse-grained document set. Then, based on the acquired coarse-grained document set, it recalls fine-grained passage. In the two-stage recall process, we use constrained decoding to ensure that content outside of the stored documents is not generated. To increase speed, we only recall a short prefix in the second stage, then locate its position to retrieve a complete passage. Experiments on KILT knowledge-sensitive tasks have verified that LLMs can independently recall reference passage location in various task forms, and the obtained reference significantly assist downstream tasks.

We propose DocFormerv2, a multi-modal transformer for Visual Document Understanding (VDU). The VDU domain entails understanding documents (beyond mere OCR predictions) e.g., extracting information from a form, VQA for documents and other tasks. VDU is challenging as it needs a model to make sense of multiple modalities (visual, language and spatial) to make a prediction. Our approach, termed DocFormerv2 is an encoder-decoder transformer which takes as input - vision, language and spatial features. DocFormerv2 is pre-trained with unsupervised tasks employed asymmetrically i.e., two novel document tasks on encoder and one on the auto-regressive decoder. The unsupervised tasks have been carefully designed to ensure that the pre-training encourages local-feature alignment between multiple modalities. DocFormerv2 when evaluated on nine datasets shows state-of-the-art performance over strong baselines e.g. TabFact (4.3%), InfoVQA (1.4%), FUNSD (1%). Furthermore, to show generalization capabilities, on three VQA tasks involving scene-text, Doc- Formerv2 outperforms previous comparably-sized models and even does better than much larger models (such as GIT2, PaLi and Flamingo) on some tasks. Extensive ablations show that due to its pre-training, DocFormerv2 understands multiple modalities better than prior-art in VDU.

Despite significant progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their performance on complex, multi-page document comprehension remains inadequate, largely due to the lack of high-quality, document-level datasets. While current retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods offer partial solutions, they suffer from issues, such as fragmented retrieval contexts, multi-stage error accumulation, and extra time costs of retrieval. In this work, we present a high-quality document-level dataset, Doc-750K, designed to support in-depth understanding of multimodal documents. This dataset includes diverse document structures, extensive cross-page dependencies, and real question-answer pairs derived from the original documents. Building on the dataset, we develop a native multimodal model, Docopilot, which can accurately handle document-level dependencies without relying on RAG. Experiments demonstrate that Docopilot achieves superior coherence, accuracy, and efficiency in document understanding tasks and multi-turn interactions, setting a new baseline for document-level multimodal understanding. Data, code, and models are released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Docopilot

The field of vision-language models (VLMs), which take images and texts as inputs and output texts, is rapidly evolving and has yet to reach consensus on several key aspects of the development pipeline, including data, architecture, and training methods. This paper can be seen as a tutorial for building a VLM. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each, addressing the major challenges in the field, and suggesting promising research directions for underexplored areas. We then walk through the practical steps to build Idefics3-8B, a powerful VLM that significantly outperforms its predecessor Idefics2-8B, while being trained efficiently, exclusively on open datasets, and using a straightforward pipeline. These steps include the creation of Docmatix, a dataset for improving document understanding capabilities, which is 240 times larger than previously available datasets. We release the model along with the datasets created for its training.

Identification of rhetorical roles like facts, arguments, and final judgments is central to understanding a legal case document and can lend power to other downstream tasks like legal case summarization and judgment prediction. However, there are several challenges to this task. Legal documents are often unstructured and contain a specialized vocabulary, making it hard for conventional transformer models to understand them. Additionally, these documents run into several pages, which makes it difficult for neural models to capture the entire context at once. Lastly, there is a dearth of annotated legal documents to train deep learning models. Previous state-of-the-art approaches for this task have focused on using neural models like BiLSTM-CRF or have explored different embedding techniques to achieve decent results. While such techniques have shown that better embedding can result in improved model performance, not many models have focused on utilizing attention for learning better embeddings in sentences of a document. Additionally, it has been recently shown that advanced techniques like multi-task learning can help the models learn better representations, thereby improving performance. In this paper, we combine these two aspects by proposing a novel family of multi-task learning-based models for rhetorical role labeling, named MARRO, that uses transformer-inspired multi-headed attention. Using label shift as an auxiliary task, we show that models from the MARRO family achieve state-of-the-art results on two labeled datasets for rhetorical role labeling, from the Indian and UK Supreme Courts.

Typically, machine learning systems solve new tasks by training on thousands of examples. In contrast, humans can solve new tasks by reading some instructions, with perhaps an example or two. To take a step toward closing this gap, we introduce a framework for developing NLP systems that solve new tasks after reading their descriptions, synthesizing prior work in this area. We instantiate this framework with a new English language dataset, ZEST, structured for task-oriented evaluation on unseen tasks. Formulating task descriptions as questions, we ensure each is general enough to apply to many possible inputs, thus comprehensively evaluating a model's ability to solve each task. Moreover, the dataset's structure tests specific types of systematic generalization. We find that the state-of-the-art T5 model achieves a score of 12% on ZEST, leaving a significant challenge for NLP researchers.

Retrieval Augment Generation (RAG) is a recent advancement in Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA). RAG has only been trained and explored with a Wikipedia-based external knowledge base and is not optimized for use in other specialized domains such as healthcare and news. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of joint training of the retriever and generator components of RAG for the task of domain adaptation in ODQA. We propose RAG-end2end, an extension to RAG, that can adapt to a domain-specific knowledge base by updating all components of the external knowledge base during training. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary training signal to inject more domain-specific knowledge. This auxiliary signal forces RAG-end2end to reconstruct a given sentence by accessing the relevant information from the external knowledge base. Our novel contribution is unlike RAG, RAG-end2end does joint training of the retriever and generator for the end QA task and domain adaptation. We evaluate our approach with datasets from three domains: COVID-19, News, and Conversations, and achieve significant performance improvements compared to the original RAG model. Our work has been open-sourced through the Huggingface Transformers library, attesting to our work's credibility and technical consistency.

We propose V-Doc, a question-answering tool using document images and PDF, mainly for researchers and general non-deep learning experts looking to generate, process, and understand the document visual question answering tasks. The V-Doc supports generating and using both extractive and abstractive question-answer pairs using documents images. The extractive QA selects a subset of tokens or phrases from the document contents to predict the answers, while the abstractive QA recognises the language in the content and generates the answer based on the trained model. Both aspects are crucial to understanding the documents, especially in an image format. We include a detailed scenario of question generation for the abstractive QA task. V-Doc supports a wide range of datasets and models, and is highly extensible through a declarative, framework-agnostic platform.

We investigate a critical yet under-explored question in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs): Do LVLMs genuinely comprehend interleaved image-text in the document? Existing document understanding benchmarks often assess LVLMs using question-answer formats, which are information-sparse and difficult to guarantee the coverage of long-range dependencies. To address this issue, we introduce a novel and challenging Multimodal Document Summarization Benchmark (M-DocSum-Bench), which comprises 500 high-quality arXiv papers, along with interleaved multimodal summaries aligned with human preferences. M-DocSum-Bench is a reference-based generation task and necessitates the generation of interleaved image-text summaries using provided reference images, thereby simultaneously evaluating capabilities in understanding, reasoning, localization, and summarization within complex multimodal document scenarios. To facilitate this benchmark, we develop an automated framework to construct summaries and propose a fine-grained evaluation method called M-DocEval. Moreover, we further develop a robust summarization baseline, i.e., M-DocSum-7B, by progressive two-stage training with diverse instruction and preference data. The extensive results on our M-DocSum-Bench reveal that the leading LVLMs struggle to maintain coherence and accurately integrate information within long and interleaved contexts, often exhibiting confusion between similar images and a lack of robustness. Notably, M-DocSum-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to larger and closed-source models (including GPT-4o, Gemini Pro, Claude-3.5-Sonnet and Qwen2.5-VL-72B, etc.), demonstrating the potential of LVLMs for improved interleaved image-text understanding. The code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/M-DocSum-Bench.

Document intelligence requires accurate text extraction and reliable reasoning over document content. We introduce DISCO, a Document Intelligence Suite for COmparative Evaluation, that evaluates optical character recognition (OCR) pipelines and vision-language models (VLMs) separately on parsing and question answering across diverse document types, including handwritten text, multilingual scripts, medical forms, infographics, and multi-page documents. Our evaluation shows that performance varies substantially across tasks and document characteristics, underscoring the need for complexity-aware approach selection. OCR pipelines are generally more reliable for handwriting and for long or multi-page documents, where explicit text grounding supports text-heavy reasoning, while VLMs perform better on multilingual text and visually rich layouts. Task-aware prompting yields mixed effects, improving performance on some document types while degrading it on others. These findings provide empirical guidance for selecting document processing strategies based on document structure and reasoning demands.

Procedural text describes dynamic state changes during a step-by-step natural process (e.g., photosynthesis). In this work, we focus on the task of procedural text understanding, which aims to comprehend such documents and track entities' states and locations during a process. Although recent approaches have achieved substantial progress, their results are far behind human performance. Two challenges, the difficulty of commonsense reasoning and data insufficiency, still remain unsolved, which require the incorporation of external knowledge bases. Previous works on external knowledge injection usually rely on noisy web mining tools and heuristic rules with limited applicable scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel KnOwledge-Aware proceduraL text understAnding (KOALA) model, which effectively leverages multiple forms of external knowledge in this task. Specifically, we retrieve informative knowledge triples from ConceptNet and perform knowledge-aware reasoning while tracking the entities. Besides, we employ a multi-stage training schema which fine-tunes the BERT model over unlabeled data collected from Wikipedia before further fine-tuning it on the final model. Experimental results on two procedural text datasets, ProPara and Recipes, verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods, in which our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in comparison to various baselines.

The development of largely human-annotated benchmarks has driven the success of deep neural networks in various NLP tasks. To enhance the effectiveness of existing benchmarks, collecting new additional input-output pairs is often too costly and challenging, particularly considering their marginal impact on improving the current model accuracy. Instead, additional or complementary annotations on the existing input texts in the benchmarks can be preferable as an efficient way to pay the additional human cost. In this paper, we investigate task-specific preferences between pairs of input texts as a new alternative way for such auxiliary data annotation. From 'pair-wise' comparisons with respect to the task, the auxiliary preference learning enables the model to learn an additional informative training signal that cannot be captured with 'instance-wise' task labels. To this end, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework, called prefer-to-classify (P2C), which can enjoy the cooperative effect of learning both the given classification task and the auxiliary preferences. Here, we provide three different ways to collect preference signals in practice: (a) implicitly extracting from annotation records (for free, but often unavailable), (b) collecting explicitly from crowd workers (high paid), or (c) pre-trained large language models such as GPT-3 (low paid). Given existing classification NLP benchmarks, we demonstrate that the proposed auxiliary preference learning via P2C on them is effective in improving text classifiers. Our codes are publicly available.

Auxiliary tasks improve the representations learned by deep reinforcement learning agents. Analytically, their effect is reasonably well understood; in practice, however, their primary use remains in support of a main learning objective, rather than as a method for learning representations. This is perhaps surprising given that many auxiliary tasks are defined procedurally, and hence can be treated as an essentially infinite source of information about the environment. Based on this observation, we study the effectiveness of auxiliary tasks for learning rich representations, focusing on the setting where the number of tasks and the size of the agent's network are simultaneously increased. For this purpose, we derive a new family of auxiliary tasks based on the successor measure. These tasks are easy to implement and have appealing theoretical properties. Combined with a suitable off-policy learning rule, the result is a representation learning algorithm that can be understood as extending Mahadevan & Maggioni (2007)'s proto-value functions to deep reinforcement learning -- accordingly, we call the resulting object proto-value networks. Through a series of experiments on the Arcade Learning Environment, we demonstrate that proto-value networks produce rich features that may be used to obtain performance comparable to established algorithms, using only linear approximation and a small number (~4M) of interactions with the environment's reward function.

There are substantial instructional videos on the Internet, which provide us tutorials for completing various tasks. Existing instructional video datasets only focus on specific steps at the video level, lacking experiential guidelines at the task level, which can lead to beginners struggling to learn new tasks due to the lack of relevant experience. Moreover, the specific steps without guidelines are trivial and unsystematic, making it difficult to provide a clear tutorial. To address these problems, we present the GUIDE (Guideline-Guided) dataset, which contains 3.5K videos of 560 instructional tasks in 8 domains related to our daily life. Specifically, we annotate each instructional task with a guideline, representing a common pattern shared by all task-related videos. On this basis, we annotate systematic specific steps, including their associated guideline steps, specific step descriptions and timestamps. Our proposed benchmark consists of three sub-tasks to evaluate comprehension ability of models: (1) Step Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps from videos. (2) Guideline Summarization: models have to mine the common pattern in task-related videos and summarize a guideline from them. (3) Guideline-Guided Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps under the guide of guideline. We evaluate plenty of foundation models with GUIDE and perform in-depth analysis. Given the diversity and practicality of GUIDE, we believe that it can be used as a better benchmark for instructional video comprehension.

A key component of successfully reading a passage of text is the ability to apply knowledge gained from the passage to a new situation. In order to facilitate progress on this kind of reading, we present ROPES, a challenging benchmark for reading comprehension targeting Reasoning Over Paragraph Effects in Situations. We target expository language describing causes and effects (e.g., "animal pollinators increase efficiency of fertilization in flowers"), as they have clear implications for new situations. A system is presented a background passage containing at least one of these relations, a novel situation that uses this background, and questions that require reasoning about effects of the relationships in the background passage in the context of the situation. We collect background passages from science textbooks and Wikipedia that contain such phenomena, and ask crowd workers to author situations, questions, and answers, resulting in a 14,322 question dataset. We analyze the challenges of this task and evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art reading comprehension models. The best model performs only slightly better than randomly guessing an answer of the correct type, at 61.6% F1, well below the human performance of 89.0%.

This report introduces PP-DocBee2, an advanced version of the PP-DocBee, designed to enhance multimodal document understanding. Built on a large multimodal model architecture, PP-DocBee2 addresses the limitations of its predecessor through key technological improvements, including enhanced synthetic data quality, improved visual feature fusion strategy, and optimized inference methodologies. These enhancements yield an 11.4% performance boost on internal benchmarks for Chinese business documents, and reduce inference latency by 73.0% to the vanilla version. A key innovation of our work is a data quality optimization strategy for multimodal document tasks. By employing a large-scale multimodal pre-trained model to evaluate data, we apply a novel statistical criterion to filter outliers, ensuring high-quality training data. Inspired by insights into underutilized intermediate features in multimodal models, we enhance the ViT representational capacity by decomposing it into layers and applying a novel feature fusion strategy to improve complex reasoning. The source code and pre-trained model are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleMIX{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleMIX}.

Documents serve as a crucial and indispensable medium for everyday workplace tasks. However, understanding, interacting and creating such documents on today's planar interfaces without any intelligent support are challenging due to our natural cognitive constraints on remembering, processing, understanding and interacting with these information. My doctorate research investigates how to bring 2D document interactions into immersive information experience using multiple of today's emergent technologies. With the examples of four specific types of documents -- medical scans, instruction document, self-report diary survey, and reference images for visual artists -- my research demonstrates how to transform such of today's 2D document interactions into an immersive information experience, by augmenting content with virtual reality, spatializing document placements with mixed reality, enriching long-term and continuous interactions with voice assistants, and simplify document creation workflow with generative AI.

Aligning sentences in a reference summary with their counterparts in source documents was shown as a useful auxiliary summarization task, notably for generating training data for salience detection. Despite its assessed utility, the alignment step was mostly approached with heuristic unsupervised methods, typically ROUGE-based, and was never independently optimized or evaluated. In this paper, we propose establishing summary-source alignment as an explicit task, while introducing two major novelties: (1) applying it at the more accurate proposition span level, and (2) approaching it as a supervised classification task. To that end, we created a novel training dataset for proposition-level alignment, derived automatically from available summarization evaluation data. In addition, we crowdsourced dev and test datasets, enabling model development and proper evaluation. Utilizing these data, we present a supervised proposition alignment baseline model, showing improved alignment-quality over the unsupervised approach.

Do LLMs genuinely incorporate external definitions, or do they primarily rely on their parametric knowledge? To address these questions, we conduct controlled experiments across multiple explanation benchmark datasets (general and domain-specific) and label definition conditions, including expert-curated, LLM-generated, perturbed, and swapped definitions. Our results reveal that while explicit label definitions can enhance accuracy and explainability, their integration into an LLM's task-solving processes is neither guaranteed nor consistent, suggesting reliance on internalized representations in many cases. Models often default to their internal representations, particularly in general tasks, whereas domain-specific tasks benefit more from explicit definitions. These findings underscore the need for a deeper understanding of how LLMs process external knowledge alongside their pre-existing capabilities.

We introduce DocPolarBERT, a layout-aware BERT model for document understanding that eliminates the need for absolute 2D positional embeddings. We extend self-attention to take into account text block positions in relative polar coordinate system rather than the Cartesian one. Despite being pre-trained on a dataset more than six times smaller than the widely used IIT-CDIP corpus, DocPolarBERT achieves state-of-the-art results. These results demonstrate that a carefully designed attention mechanism can compensate for reduced pre-training data, offering an efficient and effective alternative for document understanding.

Geometric Deep Learning has recently attracted significant interest in a wide range of machine learning fields, including document analysis. The application of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has become crucial in various document-related tasks since they can unravel important structural patterns, fundamental in key information extraction processes. Previous works in the literature propose task-driven models and do not take into account the full power of graphs. We propose Doc2Graph, a task-agnostic document understanding framework based on a GNN model, to solve different tasks given different types of documents. We evaluated our approach on two challenging datasets for key information extraction in form understanding, invoice layout analysis and table detection. Our code is freely accessible on https://github.com/andreagemelli/doc2graph.

Comprehending long visual documents, where information is distributed across extensive pages of text and visual elements, is a critical but challenging task for modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing approaches falter on a fundamental challenge: evidence localization. They struggle to retrieve relevant pages and overlook fine-grained details within visual elements, leading to limited performance and model hallucination. To address this, we propose DocLens, a tool-augmented multi-agent framework that effectively ``zooms in'' on evidence like a lens. It first navigates from the full document to specific visual elements on relevant pages, then employs a sampling-adjudication mechanism to generate a single, reliable answer. Paired with Gemini-2.5-Pro, DocLens achieves state-of-the-art performance on MMLongBench-Doc and FinRAGBench-V, surpassing even human experts. The framework's superiority is particularly evident on vision-centric and unanswerable queries, demonstrating the power of its enhanced localization capabilities.

Auxiliary function is a helpful component to improve language model's code generation ability. However, a systematic exploration of how they affect has yet to be done. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate the ability to utilize auxiliary functions encoded in recent code-pretrained language models. First, we construct a human-crafted evaluation set, called HumanExtension, which contains examples of two functions where one function assists the other. With HumanExtension, we design several experiments to examine their ability in a multifaceted way. Our evaluation processes enable a comprehensive understanding of including auxiliary functions in the prompt in terms of effectiveness and robustness. An additional implementation style analysis captures the models' various implementation patterns when they access the auxiliary function. Through this analysis, we discover the models' promising ability to utilize auxiliary functions including their self-improving behavior by implementing the two functions step-by-step. However, our analysis also reveals the model's underutilized behavior to call the auxiliary function, suggesting the future direction to enhance their implementation by eliciting the auxiliary function call ability encoded in the models. We release our code and dataset to facilitate this research direction.

Document Understanding is a foundational AI capability with broad applications, and Document Question Answering (DocQA) is a key evaluation task. Traditional methods convert the document into text for processing by Large Language Models (LLMs), but this process strips away critical multi-modal information like figures. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) address this limitation, their constrained input size makes multi-page document comprehension infeasible. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods mitigate this by selecting relevant pages, but they rely solely on semantic relevance, ignoring logical connections between pages and the query, which is essential for reasoning. To this end, we propose MoLoRAG, a logic-aware retrieval framework for multi-modal, multi-page document understanding. By constructing a page graph that captures contextual relationships between pages, a lightweight VLM performs graph traversal to retrieve relevant pages, including those with logical connections often overlooked. This approach combines semantic and logical relevance to deliver more accurate retrieval. After retrieval, the top-K pages are fed into arbitrary LVLMs for question answering. To enhance flexibility, MoLoRAG offers two variants: a training-free solution for easy deployment and a fine-tuned version to improve logical relevance checking. Experiments on four DocQA datasets demonstrate average improvements of 9.68% in accuracy over LVLM direct inference and 7.44% in retrieval precision over baselines. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/WxxShirley/MoLoRAG.

The field of visually rich document understanding (VRDU) aims to solve a multitude of well-researched NLP tasks in a multi-modal domain. Several datasets exist for research on specific tasks of VRDU such as document classification (DC), key entity extraction (KEE), entity linking, visual question answering (VQA), inter alia. These datasets cover documents like invoices and receipts with sparse annotations such that they support one or two co-related tasks (e.g., entity extraction and entity linking). Unfortunately, only focusing on a single specific of documents or task is not representative of how documents often need to be processed in the wild - where variety in style and requirements is expected. In this paper, we introduce BuDDIE (Business Document Dataset for Information Extraction), the first multi-task dataset of 1,665 real-world business documents that contains rich and dense annotations for DC, KEE, and VQA. Our dataset consists of publicly available business entity documents from US state government websites. The documents are structured and vary in their style and layout across states and types (e.g., forms, certificates, reports, etc.). We provide data variety and quality metrics for BuDDIE as well as a series of baselines for each task. Our baselines cover traditional textual, multi-modal, and large language model approaches to VRDU.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising results on document visual question answering (VQA) task, particularly after training on document instruction datasets. An effective evaluation method for document instruction data is crucial in constructing instruction data with high efficacy, which, in turn, facilitates the training of LLMs and MLLMs for document VQA. However, most existing evaluation methods for instruction data are limited to the textual content of the instructions themselves, thereby hindering the effective assessment of document instruction datasets and constraining their construction. In this paper, we propose ProcTag, a data-oriented method that assesses the efficacy of document instruction data. ProcTag innovatively performs tagging on the execution process of instructions rather than the instruction text itself. By leveraging the diversity and complexity of these tags to assess the efficacy of the given dataset, ProcTag enables selective sampling or filtering of document instructions. Furthermore, DocLayPrompt, a novel semi-structured layout-aware document prompting strategy, is proposed for effectively representing documents. Experiments demonstrate that sampling existing open-sourced and generated document VQA/instruction datasets with ProcTag significantly outperforms current methods for evaluating instruction data. Impressively, with ProcTag-based sampling in the generated document datasets, only 30.5\% of the document instructions are required to achieve 100\% efficacy compared to the complete dataset. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/DocumentUnderstanding/ProcTag.

We present a new dataset for machine comprehension in the medical domain. Our dataset uses clinical case reports with around 100,000 gap-filling queries about these cases. We apply several baselines and state-of-the-art neural readers to the dataset, and observe a considerable gap in performance (20% F1) between the best human and machine readers. We analyze the skills required for successful answering and show how reader performance varies depending on the applicable skills. We find that inferences using domain knowledge and object tracking are the most frequently required skills, and that recognizing omitted information and spatio-temporal reasoning are the most difficult for the machines.

We describe the SemEval task of extracting keyphrases and relations between them from scientific documents, which is crucial for understanding which publications describe which processes, tasks and materials. Although this was a new task, we had a total of 26 submissions across 3 evaluation scenarios. We expect the task and the findings reported in this paper to be relevant for researchers working on understanding scientific content, as well as the broader knowledge base population and information extraction communities.

We apply category theory to extract multimodal document structure which leads us to develop information theoretic measures, content summarization and extension, and self-supervised improvement of large pretrained models. We first develop a mathematical representation of a document as a category of question-answer pairs. Second, we develop an orthogonalization procedure to divide the information contained in one or more documents into non-overlapping pieces. The structures extracted in the first and second steps lead us to develop methods to measure and enumerate the information contained in a document. We also build on those steps to develop new summarization techniques, as well as to develop a solution to a new problem viz. exegesis resulting in an extension of the original document. Our question-answer pair methodology enables a novel rate distortion analysis of summarization techniques. We implement our techniques using large pretrained models, and we propose a multimodal extension of our overall mathematical framework. Finally, we develop a novel self-supervised method using RLVR to improve large pretrained models using consistency constraints such as composability and closure under certain operations that stem naturally from our category theoretic framework.

Most Reading Comprehension methods limit themselves to queries which can be answered using a single sentence, paragraph, or document. Enabling models to combine disjoint pieces of textual evidence would extend the scope of machine comprehension methods, but currently there exist no resources to train and test this capability. We propose a novel task to encourage the development of models for text understanding across multiple documents and to investigate the limits of existing methods. In our task, a model learns to seek and combine evidence - effectively performing multi-hop (alias multi-step) inference. We devise a methodology to produce datasets for this task, given a collection of query-answer pairs and thematically linked documents. Two datasets from different domains are induced, and we identify potential pitfalls and devise circumvention strategies. We evaluate two previously proposed competitive models and find that one can integrate information across documents. However, both models struggle to select relevant information, as providing documents guaranteed to be relevant greatly improves their performance. While the models outperform several strong baselines, their best accuracy reaches 42.9% compared to human performance at 74.0% - leaving ample room for improvement.

People read digital documents on a daily basis to share, exchange, and understand information in electronic settings. However, current document readers create a static, isolated reading experience, which does not support users' goals of gaining more knowledge and performing additional tasks through document interaction. In this work, we present our vision for the next-gen document reader that strives to enhance user understanding and create a more connected, trustworthy information experience. We describe 18 NLP-powered features to add to existing document readers and propose a novel plug-in marketplace that allows users to further customize their reading experience, as demonstrated through 3 exploratory UI prototypes available at https://github.com/catherinesyeh/nextgen-prototypes

Currently used metrics for assessing summarization algorithms do not account for whether summaries are factually consistent with source documents. We propose a weakly-supervised, model-based approach for verifying factual consistency and identifying conflicts between source documents and a generated summary. Training data is generated by applying a series of rule-based transformations to the sentences of source documents. The factual consistency model is then trained jointly for three tasks: 1) identify whether sentences remain factually consistent after transformation, 2) extract a span in the source documents to support the consistency prediction, 3) extract a span in the summary sentence that is inconsistent if one exists. Transferring this model to summaries generated by several state-of-the art models reveals that this highly scalable approach substantially outperforms previous models, including those trained with strong supervision using standard datasets for natural language inference and fact checking. Additionally, human evaluation shows that the auxiliary span extraction tasks provide useful assistance in the process of verifying factual consistency.

Readers of academic research papers often read with the goal of answering specific questions. Question Answering systems that can answer those questions can make consumption of the content much more efficient. However, building such tools requires data that reflect the difficulty of the task arising from complex reasoning about claims made in multiple parts of a paper. In contrast, existing information-seeking question answering datasets usually contain questions about generic factoid-type information. We therefore present QASPER, a dataset of 5,049 questions over 1,585 Natural Language Processing papers. Each question is written by an NLP practitioner who read only the title and abstract of the corresponding paper, and the question seeks information present in the full text. The questions are then answered by a separate set of NLP practitioners who also provide supporting evidence to answers. We find that existing models that do well on other QA tasks do not perform well on answering these questions, underperforming humans by at least 27 F1 points when answering them from entire papers, motivating further research in document-grounded, information-seeking QA, which our dataset is designed to facilitate.

Text generation has become more accessible than ever, and the increasing interest in these systems, especially those using large language models, has spurred an increasing number of related publications. We provide a systematic literature review comprising 244 selected papers between 2017 and 2024. This review categorizes works in text generation into five main tasks: open-ended text generation, summarization, translation, paraphrasing, and question answering. For each task, we review their relevant characteristics, sub-tasks, and specific challenges (e.g., missing datasets for multi-document summarization, coherence in story generation, and complex reasoning for question answering). Additionally, we assess current approaches for evaluating text generation systems and ascertain problems with current metrics. Our investigation shows nine prominent challenges common to all tasks and sub-tasks in recent text generation publications: bias, reasoning, hallucinations, misuse, privacy, interpretability, transparency, datasets, and computing. We provide a detailed analysis of these challenges, their potential solutions, and which gaps still require further engagement from the community. This systematic literature review targets two main audiences: early career researchers in natural language processing looking for an overview of the field and promising research directions, as well as experienced researchers seeking a detailed view of tasks, evaluation methodologies, open challenges, and recent mitigation strategies.

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows, extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

We present NoticIA, a dataset consisting of 850 Spanish news articles featuring prominent clickbait headlines, each paired with high-quality, single-sentence generative summarizations written by humans. This task demands advanced text understanding and summarization abilities, challenging the models' capacity to infer and connect diverse pieces of information to meet the user's informational needs generated by the clickbait headline. We evaluate the Spanish text comprehension capabilities of a wide range of state-of-the-art large language models. Additionally, we use the dataset to train ClickbaitFighter, a task-specific model that achieves near-human performance in this task.

The CheckThat! lab aims to advance the development of innovative technologies designed to identify and counteract online disinformation and manipulation efforts across various languages and platforms. The first five editions focused on key tasks in the information verification pipeline, including check-worthiness, evidence retrieval and pairing, and verification. Since the 2023 edition, the lab has expanded its scope to address auxiliary tasks that support research and decision-making in verification. In the 2025 edition, the lab revisits core verification tasks while also considering auxiliary challenges. Task 1 focuses on the identification of subjectivity (a follow-up from CheckThat! 2024), Task 2 addresses claim normalization, Task 3 targets fact-checking numerical claims, and Task 4 explores scientific web discourse processing. These tasks present challenging classification and retrieval problems at both the document and span levels, including multilingual settings.

We present a new dataset for Visual Question Answering (VQA) on document images called DocVQA. The dataset consists of 50,000 questions defined on 12,000+ document images. Detailed analysis of the dataset in comparison with similar datasets for VQA and reading comprehension is presented. We report several baseline results by adopting existing VQA and reading comprehension models. Although the existing models perform reasonably well on certain types of questions, there is large performance gap compared to human performance (94.36% accuracy). The models need to improve specifically on questions where understanding structure of the document is crucial. The dataset, code and leaderboard are available at docvqa.org

We introduce a new problem KTRL+F, a knowledge-augmented in-document search task that necessitates real-time identification of all semantic targets within a document with the awareness of external sources through a single natural query. This task addresses following unique challenges for in-document search: 1) utilizing knowledge outside the document for extended use of additional information about targets to bridge the semantic gap between the query and the targets, and 2) balancing between real-time applicability with the performance. We analyze various baselines in KTRL+F and find there are limitations of existing models, such as hallucinations, low latency, or difficulties in leveraging external knowledge. Therefore we propose a Knowledge-Augmented Phrase Retrieval model that shows a promising balance between speed and performance by simply augmenting external knowledge embedding in phrase embedding. Additionally, we conduct a user study to verify whether solving KTRL+F can enhance search experience of users. It demonstrates that even with our simple model users can reduce the time for searching with less queries and reduced extra visits to other sources for collecting evidence. We encourage the research community to work on KTRL+F to enhance more efficient in-document information access.

Scientific literature understanding tasks have gained significant attention due to their potential to accelerate scientific discovery. Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown effectiveness in these tasks, especially when tuned via contrastive learning. However, jointly utilizing pre-training data across multiple heterogeneous tasks (e.g., extreme classification, citation prediction, and literature search) remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-task contrastive learning framework, SciMult, with a focus on facilitating common knowledge sharing across different scientific literature understanding tasks while preventing task-specific skills from interfering with each other. To be specific, we explore two techniques -- task-aware specialization and instruction tuning. The former adopts a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture with task-aware sub-layers; the latter prepends task-specific instructions to the input text so as to produce task-aware outputs. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive collection of benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our task-aware specialization strategy in various tasks, where we outperform state-of-the-art scientific LMs.

Enterprise documents such as forms, invoices, receipts, reports, contracts, and other similar records, often carry rich semantics at the intersection of textual and spatial modalities. The visual cues offered by their complex layouts play a crucial role in comprehending these documents effectively. In this paper, we present DocLLM, a lightweight extension to traditional large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over visual documents, taking into account both textual semantics and spatial layout. Our model differs from existing multimodal LLMs by avoiding expensive image encoders and focuses exclusively on bounding box information to incorporate the spatial layout structure. Specifically, the cross-alignment between text and spatial modalities is captured by decomposing the attention mechanism in classical transformers to a set of disentangled matrices. Furthermore, we devise a pre-training objective that learns to infill text segments. This approach allows us to address irregular layouts and heterogeneous content frequently encountered in visual documents. The pre-trained model is fine-tuned using a large-scale instruction dataset, covering four core document intelligence tasks. We demonstrate that our solution outperforms SotA LLMs on 14 out of 16 datasets across all tasks, and generalizes well to 4 out of 5 previously unseen datasets.

We propose a novel problem within end-to-end learning of task-oriented dialogs (TOD), in which the dialog system mimics a troubleshooting agent who helps a user by diagnosing their problem (e.g., car not starting). Such dialogs are grounded in domain-specific flowcharts, which the agent is supposed to follow during the conversation. Our task exposes novel technical challenges for neural TOD, such as grounding an utterance to the flowchart without explicit annotation, referring to additional manual pages when user asks a clarification question, and ability to follow unseen flowcharts at test time. We release a dataset (FloDial) consisting of 2,738 dialogs grounded on 12 different troubleshooting flowcharts. We also design a neural model, FloNet, which uses a retrieval-augmented generation architecture to train the dialog agent. Our experiments find that FloNet can do zero-shot transfer to unseen flowcharts, and sets a strong baseline for future research.

We introduce Instruction Document Visual Question Answering (iDocVQA) dataset and Large Language Document (LLaDoc) model, for training Language-Vision (LV) models for document analysis and predictions on document images, respectively. Usually, deep neural networks for the DocVQA task are trained on datasets lacking instructions. We show that using instruction-following datasets improves performance. We compare performance across document-related datasets using the recent state-of-the-art (SotA) Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLaVA)1.5 as the base model. We also evaluate the performance of the derived models for object hallucination using the Polling-based Object Probing Evaluation (POPE) dataset. The results show that instruction-tuning performance ranges from 11X to 32X of zero-shot performance and from 0.1% to 4.2% over non-instruction (traditional task) finetuning. Despite the gains, these still fall short of human performance (94.36%), implying there's much room for improvement.

Research in Document Intelligence and especially in Document Key Information Extraction (DocKIE) has been mainly solved as Token Classification problem. Recent breakthroughs in both natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision helped building document-focused pre-training methods, leveraging a multimodal understanding of the document text, layout and image modalities. However, these breakthroughs also led to the emergence of a new DocKIE subtask of extractive document Question Answering (DocQA), as part of the Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) research field. In this work, we compare the Question Answering approach with the classical token classification approach for document key information extraction. We designed experiments to benchmark five different experimental setups : raw performances, robustness to noisy environment, capacity to extract long entities, fine-tuning speed on Few-Shot Learning and finally Zero-Shot Learning. Our research showed that when dealing with clean and relatively short entities, it is still best to use token classification-based approach, while the QA approach could be a good alternative for noisy environment or long entities use-cases.

It has been observed in recent years that transformers have problems with length generalization for certain types of reasoning and arithmetic tasks. In particular, the performance of a transformer model trained on tasks (say addition) up to a certain length (e.g., 5 digit numbers) drops sharply when applied to longer instances of the same problem. This work proposes an approach based on task hinting towards addressing length generalization. Our key idea is that while training the model on task-specific data, it is helpful to simultaneously train the model to solve a simpler but related auxiliary task as well. We study the classical sorting problem as a canonical example to evaluate our approach. We design a multitask training framework and show that task hinting significantly improve length generalization. For sorting we show that it is possible to train models on data consisting of sequences having length at most 20, and improve the test accuracy on sequences of length 100 from less than 1% (for standard training) to more than 92% (via task hinting). Our study uncovers several interesting aspects of length generalization. We observe that while several auxiliary tasks may seem natural a priori, their effectiveness in improving length generalization differs dramatically. We further use probing and visualization-based techniques to understand the internal mechanisms via which the model performs the task, and propose a theoretical construction consistent with the observed learning behaviors of the model. Based on our construction, we show that introducing a small number of length dependent parameters into the training procedure can further boost the performance on unseen lengths. Finally, we also show the efficacy of our task hinting based approach beyond sorting, giving hope that these techniques will be applicable in broader contexts.

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) highlights the critical importance of conducting thorough evaluations to discern their comparative advantages, limitations, and optimal use cases. Particularly important is assessing their capacity to accurately retrieve information included in a given prompt. A model's ability to do this significantly influences how effectively it can utilize contextual details, thus impacting its practical efficacy and dependability in real-world applications. Our research analyzes the in-context recall performance of various LLMs using the needle-in-a-haystack method. In this approach, a factoid (the "needle") is embedded within a block of filler text (the "haystack"), which the model is asked to retrieve. We assess the recall performance of each model across various haystack lengths and with varying needle placements to identify performance patterns. This study demonstrates that an LLM's recall capability is not only contingent upon the prompt's content but also may be compromised by biases in its training data. Conversely, adjustments to model architecture, training strategy, or fine-tuning can improve performance. Our analysis provides insight into LLM behavior, offering direction for the development of more effective applications of LLMs.

In recent years, research on visual document understanding (VDU) has grown significantly, with a particular emphasis on the development of self-supervised learning methods. However, one of the significant challenges faced in this field is the limited availability of publicly accessible visual corpora or extensive collections of images with detailed text annotations, particularly for non-Latin or resource-scarce languages. To address this challenge, we propose Web-based Visual Corpus Builder (Webvicob), a dataset generator engine capable of constructing large-scale, multilingual visual corpora from raw Wikipedia HTML dumps. Our experiments demonstrate that the data generated by Webvicob can be used to train robust VDU models that perform well on various downstream tasks, such as DocVQA and post-OCR parsing. Furthermore, when using a dataset of 1 million images generated by Webvicob, we observed an improvement of over 13% on the DocVQA Task 3 compared to a dataset of 11 million images from the IIT-CDIP. The implementation of our engine is publicly available on https://github.com/clovaai/webvicob

Recent visuolinguistic pre-trained models show promising progress on various end tasks such as image retrieval and video captioning. Yet, they fail miserably on the recently proposed Winoground dataset, which challenges models to match paired images and English captions, with items constructed to overlap lexically but differ in meaning (e.g., "there is a mug in some grass" vs. "there is some grass in a mug"). By annotating the dataset using new fine-grained tags, we show that solving the Winoground task requires not just compositional language understanding, but a host of other abilities like commonsense reasoning or locating small, out-of-focus objects in low-resolution images. In this paper, we identify the dataset's main challenges through a suite of experiments on related tasks (probing task, image retrieval task), data augmentation, and manual inspection of the dataset. Our analysis suggests that a main challenge in visuolinguistic models may lie in fusing visual and textual representations, rather than in compositional language understanding. We release our annotation and code at https://github.com/ajd12342/why-winoground-hard .

Producing a reduced version of a source text, as in generic or focused summarization, inherently involves two distinct subtasks: deciding on targeted content and generating a coherent text conveying it. While some popular approaches address summarization as a single end-to-end task, prominent works support decomposed modeling for individual subtasks. Further, semi-automated text reduction is also very appealing, where users may identify targeted content while models would generate a corresponding coherent summary. In this paper, we focus on the second subtask, of generating coherent text given pre-selected content. Concretely, we formalize Controlled Text Reduction as a standalone task, whose input is a source text with marked spans of targeted content ("highlighting"). A model then needs to generate a coherent text that includes all and only the target information. We advocate the potential of such models, both for modular fully-automatic summarization, as well as for semi-automated human-in-the-loop use cases. Facilitating proper research, we crowdsource high-quality dev and test datasets for the task. Further, we automatically generate a larger "silver" training dataset from available summarization benchmarks, leveraging a pretrained summary-source alignment model. Finally, employing these datasets, we present a supervised baseline model, showing promising results and insightful analyses.

End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) can directly generate responses in an end-to-end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. The advancement of deep neural networks, especially the successful use of large pre-trained models, has further led to significant progress in EToD research in recent years. In this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches as well as recent trends to advance the development of EToD research. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) \textit{First survey}: to our knowledge, we take the first step to present a thorough survey of this research field; (2) \textit{New taxonomy}: we first introduce a unified perspective for EToD, including (i) Modularly EToD and (ii) Fully EToD; (3) \textit{New Frontiers}: we discuss some potential frontier areas as well as the corresponding challenges, hoping to spur breakthrough research in EToD field; (4) \textit{Abundant resources}: we build a public websiteWe collect the related papers, baseline projects, and leaderboards for the community at \url{https://etods.net/.}, where EToD researchers could directly access the recent progress. We hope this work can serve as a thorough reference for the EToD research community.

This paper summarizes our submission to Task 2 of the second track of the 10th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC10) "Knowledge-grounded Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations". Similar to the previous year's iteration, the task consists of three subtasks: detecting whether a turn is knowledge seeking, selecting the relevant knowledge document and finally generating a grounded response. This year, the focus lies on adapting the system to noisy ASR transcripts. We explore different approaches to make the models more robust to this type of input and to adapt the generated responses to the style of spoken conversations. For the latter, we get the best results with a noisy channel model that additionally reduces the number of short and generic responses. Our best system achieved the 1st rank in the automatic and the 3rd rank in the human evaluation of the challenge.

As a step toward better document-level understanding, we explore classification of a sequence of sentences into their corresponding categories, a task that requires understanding sentences in context of the document. Recent successful models for this task have used hierarchical models to contextualize sentence representations, and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to incorporate dependencies between subsequent labels. In this work, we show that pretrained language models, BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) in particular, can be used for this task to capture contextual dependencies without the need for hierarchical encoding nor a CRF. Specifically, we construct a joint sentence representation that allows BERT Transformer layers to directly utilize contextual information from all words in all sentences. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on four datasets, including a new dataset of structured scientific abstracts.

Recent literature uses language to build foundation models for audio. These Audio-Language Models (ALMs) are trained on a vast number of audio-text pairs and show remarkable performance in tasks including Text-to-Audio Retrieval, Captioning, and Question Answering. However, their ability to engage in more complex open-ended tasks, like Interactive Question-Answering, requires proficiency in logical reasoning -- a skill not yet benchmarked. We introduce the novel task of Audio Entailment to evaluate an ALM's deductive reasoning ability. This task assesses whether a text description (hypothesis) of audio content can be deduced from an audio recording (premise), with potential conclusions being entailment, neutral, or contradiction, depending on the sufficiency of the evidence. We create two datasets for this task with audio recordings sourced from two audio captioning datasets -- AudioCaps and Clotho -- and hypotheses generated using Large Language Models (LLMs). We benchmark state-of-the-art ALMs and find deficiencies in logical reasoning with both zero-shot and linear probe evaluations. Finally, we propose "caption-before-reason", an intermediate step of captioning that improves the zero-shot and linear-probe performance of ALMs by an absolute 6% and 3%, respectively.

Recently, it is shown that deploying a proper self-supervision is a prospective way to enhance the performance of supervised learning. Yet, the benefits of self-supervision are not fully exploited as previous pretext tasks are specialized for unsupervised representation learning. To this end, we begin by presenting three desirable properties for such auxiliary tasks to assist the supervised objective. First, the tasks need to guide the model to learn rich features. Second, the transformations involved in the self-supervision should not significantly alter the training distribution. Third, the tasks are preferred to be light and generic for high applicability to prior arts. Subsequently, to show how existing pretext tasks can fulfill these and be tailored for supervised learning, we propose a simple auxiliary self-supervision task, predicting localizable rotation (LoRot). Our exhaustive experiments validate the merits of LoRot as a pretext task tailored for supervised learning in terms of robustness and generalization capability. Our code is available at https://github.com/wjun0830/Localizable-Rotation.

Pretrained language models have improved effectiveness on numerous tasks, including ad-hoc retrieval. Recent work has shown that continuing to pretrain a language model with auxiliary objectives before fine-tuning on the retrieval task can further improve retrieval effectiveness. Unlike monolingual retrieval, designing an appropriate auxiliary task for cross-language mappings is challenging. To address this challenge, we use comparable Wikipedia articles in different languages to further pretrain off-the-shelf multilingual pretrained models before fine-tuning on the retrieval task. We show that our approach yields improvements in retrieval effectiveness.

This work explores knowledge distillation (KD) for visually-rich document (VRD) applications such as document layout analysis (DLA) and document image classification (DIC). While VRD research is dependent on increasingly sophisticated and cumbersome models, the field has neglected to study efficiency via model compression. Here, we design a KD experimentation methodology for more lean, performant models on document understanding (DU) tasks that are integral within larger task pipelines. We carefully selected KD strategies (response-based, feature-based) for distilling knowledge to and from backbones with different architectures (ResNet, ViT, DiT) and capacities (base, small, tiny). We study what affects the teacher-student knowledge gap and find that some methods (tuned vanilla KD, MSE, SimKD with an apt projector) can consistently outperform supervised student training. Furthermore, we design downstream task setups to evaluate covariate shift and the robustness of distilled DLA models on zero-shot layout-aware document visual question answering (DocVQA). DLA-KD experiments result in a large mAP knowledge gap, which unpredictably translates to downstream robustness, accentuating the need to further explore how to efficiently obtain more semantic document layout awareness.

Automatically summarizing patients' main problems from daily progress notes using natural language processing methods helps to battle against information and cognitive overload in hospital settings and potentially assists providers with computerized diagnostic decision support. Problem list summarization requires a model to understand, abstract, and generate clinical documentation. In this work, we propose a new NLP task that aims to generate a list of problems in a patient's daily care plan using input from the provider's progress notes during hospitalization. We investigate the performance of T5 and BART, two state-of-the-art seq2seq transformer architectures, in solving this problem. We provide a corpus built on top of progress notes from publicly available electronic health record progress notes in the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC)-III. T5 and BART are trained on general domain text, and we experiment with a data augmentation method and a domain adaptation pre-training method to increase exposure to medical vocabulary and knowledge. Evaluation methods include ROUGE, BERTScore, cosine similarity on sentence embedding, and F-score on medical concepts. Results show that T5 with domain adaptive pre-training achieves significant performance gains compared to a rule-based system and general domain pre-trained language models, indicating a promising direction for tackling the problem summarization task.

Auxiliary learning is an effective method for enhancing the generalization capabilities of trained models, particularly when dealing with small datasets. However, this approach may present several difficulties: (i) optimizing multiple objectives can be more challenging, and (ii) how to balance the auxiliary tasks to best assist the main task is unclear. In this work, we propose a novel approach, named AuxiNash, for balancing tasks in auxiliary learning by formalizing the problem as generalized bargaining game with asymmetric task bargaining power. Furthermore, we describe an efficient procedure for learning the bargaining power of tasks based on their contribution to the performance of the main task and derive theoretical guarantees for its convergence. Finally, we evaluate AuxiNash on multiple multi-task benchmarks and find that it consistently outperforms competing methods.

Most work in machine reading focuses on question answering problems where the answer is directly expressed in the text to read. However, many real-world question answering problems require the reading of text not because it contains the literal answer, but because it contains a recipe to derive an answer together with the reader's background knowledge. One example is the task of interpreting regulations to answer "Can I...?" or "Do I have to...?" questions such as "I am working in Canada. Do I have to carry on paying UK National Insurance?" after reading a UK government website about this topic. This task requires both the interpretation of rules and the application of background knowledge. It is further complicated due to the fact that, in practice, most questions are underspecified, and a human assistant will regularly have to ask clarification questions such as "How long have you been working abroad?" when the answer cannot be directly derived from the question and text. In this paper, we formalise this task and develop a crowd-sourcing strategy to collect 32k task instances based on real-world rules and crowd-generated questions and scenarios. We analyse the challenges of this task and assess its difficulty by evaluating the performance of rule-based and machine-learning baselines. We observe promising results when no background knowledge is necessary, and substantial room for improvement whenever background knowledge is needed.

This paper summarizes our work on the first track of the ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC 9), "Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access". The goal of the task is to generate responses to user turns in a task-oriented dialog that require knowledge from unstructured documents. The task is divided into three subtasks: detection, selection and generation. In order to be compute efficient, we formulate the selection problem in terms of hierarchical classification steps. We achieve our best results with this model. Alternatively, we employ siamese sequence embedding models, referred to as Dense Knowledge Retrieval, to retrieve relevant documents. This method further reduces the computation time by a factor of more than 100x at the cost of degradation in R@1 of 5-6% compared to the first model. Then for either approach, we use Retrieval Augmented Generation to generate responses based on multiple selected snippets and we show how the method can be used to fine-tune trained embeddings.

Historically, sign language machine translation has been posed as a sentence-level task: datasets consisting of continuous narratives are chopped up and presented to the model as isolated clips. In this work, we explore the limitations of this task framing. First, we survey a number of linguistic phenomena in sign languages that depend on discourse-level context. Then as a case study, we perform the first human baseline for sign language translation that actually substitutes a human into the machine learning task framing, rather than provide the human with the entire document as context. This human baseline -- for ASL to English translation on the How2Sign dataset -- shows that for 33% of sentences in our sample, our fluent Deaf signer annotators were only able to understand key parts of the clip in light of additional discourse-level context. These results underscore the importance of understanding and sanity checking examples when adapting machine learning to new domains.

Multi-document grounded dialogue systems (DGDS) belong to a class of conversational agents that answer users' requests by finding supporting knowledge from a collection of documents. Most previous studies aim to improve the knowledge retrieval model or propose more effective ways to incorporate external knowledge into a parametric generation model. These methods, however, focus on retrieving knowledge from mono-granularity language units (e.g. passages, sentences, or spans in documents), which is not enough to effectively and efficiently capture precise knowledge in long documents. This paper proposes Re3G, which aims to optimize both coarse-grained knowledge retrieval and fine-grained knowledge extraction in a unified framework. Specifically, the former efficiently finds relevant passages in a retrieval-and-reranking process, whereas the latter effectively extracts finer-grain spans within those passages to incorporate into a parametric answer generation model (BART, T5). Experiments on DialDoc Shared Task demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

We propose DuoRC, a novel dataset for Reading Comprehension (RC) that motivates several new challenges for neural approaches in language understanding beyond those offered by existing RC datasets. DuoRC contains 186,089 unique question-answer pairs created from a collection of 7680 pairs of movie plots where each pair in the collection reflects two versions of the same movie - one from Wikipedia and the other from IMDb - written by two different authors. We asked crowdsourced workers to create questions from one version of the plot and a different set of workers to extract or synthesize answers from the other version. This unique characteristic of DuoRC where questions and answers are created from different versions of a document narrating the same underlying story, ensures by design, that there is very little lexical overlap between the questions created from one version and the segments containing the answer in the other version. Further, since the two versions have different levels of plot detail, narration style, vocabulary, etc., answering questions from the second version requires deeper language understanding and incorporating external background knowledge. Additionally, the narrative style of passages arising from movie plots (as opposed to typical descriptive passages in existing datasets) exhibits the need to perform complex reasoning over events across multiple sentences. Indeed, we observe that state-of-the-art neural RC models which have achieved near human performance on the SQuAD dataset, even when coupled with traditional NLP techniques to address the challenges presented in DuoRC exhibit very poor performance (F1 score of 37.42% on DuoRC v/s 86% on SQuAD dataset). This opens up several interesting research avenues wherein DuoRC could complement other RC datasets to explore novel neural approaches for studying language understanding.

Tasking machines with understanding receipts can have important applications such as enabling detailed analytics on purchases, enforcing expense policies, and inferring patterns of purchase behavior on large collections of receipts. In this paper, we focus on the task of Named Entity Linking (NEL) of scanned receipt line items; specifically, the task entails associating shorthand text from OCR'd receipts with a knowledge base (KB) of grocery products. For example, the scanned item "STO BABY SPINACH" should be linked to the catalog item labeled "Simple Truth Organic Baby Spinach". Experiments that employ a variety of Information Retrieval techniques in combination with statistical phrase detection shows promise for effective understanding of scanned receipt data.

The web is full of guidance on a wide variety of tasks, from changing the oil in your car to baking an apple pie. However, as content is created independently, a single task could have thousands of corresponding procedural texts. This makes it difficult for users to view the bigger picture and understand the multiple ways the task could be accomplished. In this work we propose an unsupervised learning approach for summarizing multiple procedural texts into an intuitive graph representation, allowing users to easily explore commonalities and differences. We demonstrate our approach on recipes, a prominent example of procedural texts. User studies show that our representation is intuitive and coherent and that it has the potential to help users with several sensemaking tasks, including adapting recipes for a novice cook and finding creative ways to spice up a dish.

This paper proposes LayoutLLM, a more flexible document analysis method for understanding imaged documents. Visually Rich Document Understanding tasks, such as document image classification and information extraction, have gained significant attention due to their importance. Existing methods have been developed to enhance document comprehension by incorporating pre-training awareness of images, text, and layout structure. However, these methods require fine-tuning for each task and dataset, and the models are expensive to train and operate. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new LayoutLLM that integrates these with large-scale language models (LLMs). By leveraging the strengths of existing research in document image understanding and LLMs' superior language understanding capabilities, the proposed model, fine-tuned with multimodal instruction datasets, performs an understanding of document images in a single model. Our experiments demonstrate improvement over the baseline model in various document analysis tasks.

Structure information is critical for understanding the semantics of text-rich images, such as documents, tables, and charts. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Visual Document Understanding are equipped with text recognition ability but lack general structure understanding abilities for text-rich document images. In this work, we emphasize the importance of structure information in Visual Document Understanding and propose the Unified Structure Learning to boost the performance of MLLMs. Our Unified Structure Learning comprises structure-aware parsing tasks and multi-grained text localization tasks across 5 domains: document, webpage, table, chart, and natural image. To better encode structure information, we design a simple and effective vision-to-text module H-Reducer, which can not only maintain the layout information but also reduce the length of visual features by merging horizontal adjacent patches through convolution, enabling the LLM to understand high-resolution images more efficiently. Furthermore, by constructing structure-aware text sequences and multi-grained pairs of texts and bounding boxes for publicly available text-rich images, we build a comprehensive training set DocStruct4M to support structure learning. Finally, we construct a small but high-quality reasoning tuning dataset DocReason25K to trigger the detailed explanation ability in the document domain. Our model DocOwl 1.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 visual document understanding benchmarks, improving the SOTA performance of MLLMs with a 7B LLM by more than 10 points in 5/10 benchmarks. Our codes, models, and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl/tree/main/DocOwl1.5.

An effective multi-turn instruction-following assistant can be developed by creating a simulator that can generate useful interaction data. Apart from relying on its intrinsic weights, an ideal user simulator should also be able to bootstrap external knowledge rapidly in its raw form to simulate the multifarious diversity of text available over the internet. Previous user simulators generally lacked diversity, were mostly closed domain, and necessitated rigid schema making them inefficient to rapidly scale to incorporate external knowledge. In this regard, we introduce, Kaucus, a Knowledge-Augmented User Simulator framework, to outline a process of creating diverse user simulators, that can seamlessly exploit external knowledge as well as benefit downstream assistant model training. Through two GPT-J based simulators viz., a Retrieval Augmented Simulator and a Summary Controlled Simulator we generate diverse simulator-assistant interactions. Through reward and preference model-based evaluations, we find that these interactions serve as useful training data and create more helpful downstream assistants. We also find that incorporating knowledge through retrieval augmentation or summary control helps create better assistants.

We consider the problem of translating high-level textual descriptions to formal representations in technical documentation as part of an effort to model the meaning of such documentation. We focus specifically on the problem of learning translational correspondences between text descriptions and grounded representations in the target documentation, such as formal representation of functions or code templates. Our approach exploits the parallel nature of such documentation, or the tight coupling between high-level text and the low-level representations we aim to learn. Data is collected by mining technical documents for such parallel text-representation pairs, which we use to train a simple semantic parsing model. We report new baseline results on sixteen novel datasets, including the standard library documentation for nine popular programming languages across seven natural languages, and a small collection of Unix utility manuals.

While recent work in abstractive summarization has resulted in higher scores in automatic metrics, there is little understanding on how these systems combine information taken from multiple document sentences. In this paper, we analyze the outputs of five state-of-the-art abstractive summarizers, focusing on summary sentences that are formed by sentence fusion. We ask assessors to judge the grammaticality, faithfulness, and method of fusion for summary sentences. Our analysis reveals that system sentences are mostly grammatical, but often fail to remain faithful to the original article.

Automatically understanding the rhetorical roles of sentences in a legal case judgement is an important problem to solve, since it can help in several downstream tasks like summarization of legal judgments, legal search, and so on. The task is challenging since legal case documents are usually not well-structured, and these rhetorical roles may be subjective (as evident from variation of opinions between legal experts). In this paper, we address this task for judgments from the Supreme Court of India. We label sentences in 50 documents using multiple human annotators, and perform an extensive analysis of the human-assigned labels. We also attempt automatic identification of the rhetorical roles of sentences. While prior approaches towards this task used Conditional Random Fields over manually handcrafted features, we explore the use of deep neural models which do not require hand-crafting of features. Experiments show that neural models perform much better in this task than baseline methods which use handcrafted features.

Language models (LMs) can make a correct prediction based on many possible signals in a prompt, not all corresponding to recall of factual associations. However, current interpretations of LMs fail to take this into account. For example, given the query "Astrid Lindgren was born in" with the corresponding completion "Sweden", no difference is made between whether the prediction was based on knowing where the author was born or assuming that a person with a Swedish-sounding name was born in Sweden. In this paper, we present a model-specific recipe - PrISM - for constructing datasets with examples of four different prediction scenarios: generic language modeling, guesswork, heuristics recall and exact fact recall. We apply two popular interpretability methods to the scenarios: causal tracing (CT) and information flow analysis. We find that both yield distinct results for each scenario. Results for exact fact recall and generic language modeling scenarios confirm previous conclusions about the importance of mid-range MLP sublayers for fact recall, while results for guesswork and heuristics indicate a critical role of late last token position MLP sublayers. In summary, we contribute resources for a more extensive and granular study of fact completion in LMs, together with analyses that provide a more nuanced understanding of how LMs process fact-related queries.

An abundance of datasets and availability of reliable evaluation metrics have resulted in strong progress in factoid question answering (QA). This progress, however, does not easily transfer to the task of long-form QA, where the goal is to answer questions that require in-depth explanations. The hurdles include (i) a lack of high-quality data, and (ii) the absence of a well-defined notion of the answer's quality. In this work, we address these problems by (i) releasing a novel dataset and a task that we call ASQA (Answer Summaries for Questions which are Ambiguous); and (ii) proposing a reliable metric for measuring performance on ASQA. Our task focuses on factoid questions that are ambiguous, that is, have different correct answers depending on interpretation. Answers to ambiguous questions should synthesize factual information from multiple sources into a long-form summary that resolves the ambiguity. In contrast to existing long-form QA tasks (such as ELI5), ASQA admits a clear notion of correctness: a user faced with a good summary should be able to answer different interpretations of the original ambiguous question. We use this notion of correctness to define an automated metric of performance for ASQA. Our analysis demonstrates an agreement between this metric and human judgments, and reveals a considerable gap between human performance and strong baselines.

Modern abstractive summarization models often generate summaries that contain hallucinated or contradictory information. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective contrastive learning framework that incorporates recent developments in reward learning and factuality metrics. Empirical studies demonstrate that the proposed framework enables summarization models to learn from feedback of factuality metrics using contrastive reward learning, leading to more factual summaries by human evaluations. This suggests that further advances in learning and evaluation algorithms can feed directly into providing more factual summaries.

Knowledge-intensive tasks (e.g., open-domain question answering (QA)) require a substantial amount of factual knowledge and often rely on external information for assistance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) (e.g., ChatGPT), have demonstrated impressive prowess in solving a wide range of tasks with world knowledge, including knowledge-intensive tasks. However, it remains unclear how well LLMs are able to perceive their factual knowledge boundaries, particularly how they behave when incorporating retrieval augmentation. In this study, we present an initial analysis of the factual knowledge boundaries of LLMs and how retrieval augmentation affects LLMs on open-domain QA. Specially, we focus on three primary research questions and analyze them by examining QA performance, priori judgement and posteriori judgement of LLMs. We show evidence that LLMs possess unwavering confidence in their capabilities to respond to questions and the accuracy of their responses. Furthermore, retrieval augmentation proves to be an effective approach in enhancing LLMs' awareness of knowledge boundaries, thereby improving their judgemental abilities. Additionally, we also find that LLMs have a propensity to rely on the provided retrieval results when formulating answers, while the quality of these results significantly impacts their reliance. The code to reproduce this work is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LLM-Knowledge-Boundary.

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection. The task featured three subtasks. Subtask A is a binary classification task determining whether a text is written by a human or generated by a machine. This subtask has two tracks: a monolingual track focused solely on English texts and a multilingual track. Subtask B is to detect the exact source of a text, discerning whether it is written by a human or generated by a specific LLM. Subtask C aims to identify the changing point within a text, at which the authorship transitions from human to machine. The task attracted a large number of participants: subtask A monolingual (126), subtask A multilingual (59), subtask B (70), and subtask C (30). In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For all subtasks, the best systems used LLMs.

In order for large language model (LLM)-based assistants to effectively adapt to evolving information needs, it must be possible to update their factual knowledge through continued training on new data. The standard recipe for doing so involves continued pre-training on new documents followed by instruction-tuning on question-answer (QA) pairs. However, we find that LLMs trained with this recipe struggle to answer questions, even though the perplexity of documents is minimized. We found that QA pairs are generally straightforward, while documents are more complex, weaving many factual statements together in an intricate manner. Therefore, we hypothesize that it is beneficial to expose LLMs to QA pairs before continued pre-training on documents so that the process of encoding knowledge from complex documents takes into account how this knowledge is accessed through questions. Based on this, we propose pre-instruction-tuning (PIT), a method that instruction-tunes on questions prior to training on documents. This contrasts with standard instruction-tuning, which learns how to extract knowledge after training on documents. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that PIT significantly enhances the ability of LLMs to absorb knowledge from new documents, outperforming standard instruction-tuning by 17.8%.

Large vision language models (LVLMs) have improved the document understanding capabilities remarkably, enabling the handling of complex document elements, longer contexts, and a wider range of tasks. However, existing document understanding benchmarks have been limited to handling only a small number of pages and fail to provide a comprehensive analysis of layout elements locating. In this paper, we first define three primary task categories: Long Document Understanding, numerical Reasoning, and cross-element Locating, and then propose a comprehensive benchmark, LongDocURL, integrating above three primary tasks and comprising 20 sub-tasks categorized based on different primary tasks and answer evidences. Furthermore, we develop a semi-automated construction pipeline and collect 2,325 high-quality question-answering pairs, covering more than 33,000 pages of documents, significantly outperforming existing benchmarks. Subsequently, we conduct comprehensive evaluation experiments on both open-source and closed-source models across 26 different configurations, revealing critical performance gaps in this field.

Document Question Answering (QA) presents a challenge in understanding visually-rich documents (VRD), particularly those dominated by lengthy textual content like research journal articles. Existing studies primarily focus on real-world documents with sparse text, while challenges persist in comprehending the hierarchical semantic relations among multiple pages to locate multimodal components. To address this gap, we propose PDF-MVQA, which is tailored for research journal articles, encompassing multiple pages and multimodal information retrieval. Unlike traditional machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks, our approach aims to retrieve entire paragraphs containing answers or visually rich document entities like tables and figures. Our contributions include the introduction of a comprehensive PDF Document VQA dataset, allowing the examination of semantically hierarchical layout structures in text-dominant documents. We also present new VRD-QA frameworks designed to grasp textual contents and relations among document layouts simultaneously, extending page-level understanding to the entire multi-page document. Through this work, we aim to enhance the capabilities of existing vision-and-language models in handling challenges posed by text-dominant documents in VRD-QA.

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with external data have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in completing real-world tasks. Techniques for integrating external data into LLMs, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning, are gaining increasing attention and widespread application. Nonetheless, the effective deployment of data-augmented LLMs across various specialized fields presents substantial challenges. These challenges encompass a wide range of issues, from retrieving relevant data and accurately interpreting user intent to fully harnessing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs for complex tasks. We believe that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for data-augmented LLM applications. In practice, underperformance often arises from a failure to correctly identify the core focus of a task or because the task inherently requires a blend of multiple capabilities that must be disentangled for better resolution. In this survey, we propose a RAG task categorization method, classifying user queries into four levels based on the type of external data required and primary focus of the task: explicit fact queries, implicit fact queries, interpretable rationale queries, and hidden rationale queries. We define these levels of queries, provide relevant datasets, and summarize the key challenges and most effective techniques for addressing these challenges. Finally, we discuss three main forms of integrating external data into LLMs: context, small model, and fine-tuning, highlighting their respective strengths, limitations, and the types of problems they are suited to solve. This work aims to help readers thoroughly understand and decompose the data requirements and key bottlenecks in building LLM applications, offering solutions to the different challenges and serving as a guide to systematically developing such applications.

Task semantics can be expressed by a set of input-to-output examples or a piece of textual instruction. Conventional machine learning approaches for natural language processing (NLP) mainly rely on the availability of large-scale sets of task-specific examples. Two issues arise: first, collecting task-specific labeled examples does not apply to scenarios where tasks may be too complicated or costly to annotate, or the system is required to handle a new task immediately; second, this is not user-friendly since end-users are probably more willing to provide task description rather than a set of examples before using the system. Therefore, the community is paying increasing interest in a new supervision-seeking paradigm for NLP: learning from task instructions. Despite its impressive progress, there are some common issues that the community struggles with. This survey paper tries to summarize and provide insights into the current research on instruction learning, particularly by answering the following questions: (i) What is task instruction, and what instruction types exist? (ii) How to model instructions? (iii) What factors influence and explain the instructions' performance? (iv) What challenges remain in instruction learning? To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey about textual instructions.

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2020 Task 11 on Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles. The task featured two subtasks. Subtask SI is about Span Identification: given a plain-text document, spot the specific text fragments containing propaganda. Subtask TC is about Technique Classification: given a specific text fragment, in the context of a full document, determine the propaganda technique it uses, choosing from an inventory of 14 possible propaganda techniques. The task attracted a large number of participants: 250 teams signed up to participate and 44 made a submission on the test set. In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For both subtasks, the best systems used pre-trained Transformers and ensembles.

In this paper, we study abstractive summarization for open-domain videos. Unlike the traditional text news summarization, the goal is less to "compress" text information but rather to provide a fluent textual summary of information that has been collected and fused from different source modalities, in our case video and audio transcripts (or text). We show how a multi-source sequence-to-sequence model with hierarchical attention can integrate information from different modalities into a coherent output, compare various models trained with different modalities and present pilot experiments on the How2 corpus of instructional videos. We also propose a new evaluation metric (Content F1) for abstractive summarization task that measures semantic adequacy rather than fluency of the summaries, which is covered by metrics like ROUGE and BLEU.

Modern retrieval systems, whether lexical or semantic, expose a corpus through a fixed similarity interface that compresses access into a single top-k retrieval step before reasoning. This abstraction is efficient, but for agentic search, it becomes a bottleneck: exact lexical constraints, sparse clue conjunctions, local context checks, and multi-step hypothesis refinement are difficult to implement by calling a conventional off-the-shelf retriever, and evidence filtered out early cannot be recovered by stronger downstream reasoning. Agentic tasks further exacerbate this limitation because they require agents to orchestrate multiple steps, including discovering intermediate entities, combining weak clues, and revising the plan after observing partial evidence. To tackle the limitation, we study direct corpus interaction (DCI), where an agent searches the raw corpus directly with general-purpose terminal tools (e.g., grep, file reads, shell commands, lightweight scripts), without any embedding model, vector index, or retrieval API. This approach requires no offline indexing and adapts naturally to evolving local corpora. Across IR benchmarks and end-to-end agentic search tasks, this simple setup substantially outperforms strong sparse, dense, and reranking baselines on several BRIGHT and BEIR datasets, and attains strong accuracy on BrowseComp-Plus and multi-hop QA without relying on any conventional semantic retriever. Our results indicate that as language agents become stronger, retrieval quality depends not only on reasoning ability but also on the resolution of the interface through which the model interacts with the corpus, with which DCI opens a broader interface-design space for agentic search.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively combines LLMs generative capabilities with external retrieval-based information. The Hybrid Document RAG task aims to integrate textual and hierarchical tabular data for more comprehensive retrieval and generation in complex scenarios. However, there is no existing dataset specifically designed for this task that includes both text and tabular data. Additionally, existing methods struggle to retrieve relevant tabular data and integrate it with text. Semantic similarity-based retrieval lacks accuracy, while table-specific methods fail to handle complex hierarchical structures effectively. Furthermore, the QA task requires complex reasoning and calculations, further complicating the challenge. In this paper, we propose a new large-scale dataset, DocRAGLib, specifically designed for the question answering (QA) task scenario under Hybrid Document RAG. To tackle these challenges, we introduce HD-RAG, a novel framework that incorporates a row-and-column level (RCL) table representation, employs a two-stage process combining ensemble and LLM-based retrieval, and integrates RECAP, which is designed for multi-step reasoning and complex calculations in Document-QA tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments with DocRAGLib, showing that HD-RAG outperforms existing baselines in both retrieval accuracy and QA performance, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Retrieval Augmented Generation faces a trade-off: concatenating documents in a long prompt enables multi-document reasoning but creates prefill bottlenecks, while encoding document KV caches separately offers speed but breaks cross-document interaction. We propose Parallel Context-of-Experts Decoding (Pced), a training-free framework that shifts evidence aggregation from the attention mechanism to the decoding. Pced treats retrieved documents as isolated "experts", synchronizing their predictions via a novel retrieval-aware contrastive decoding rule that weighs expert logits against the model prior. This approach recovers cross-document reasoning capabilities without constructing a shared attention across documents.

A long-term goal of machine learning is to build intelligent conversational agents. One recent popular approach is to train end-to-end models on a large amount of real dialog transcripts between humans (Sordoni et al., 2015; Vinyals & Le, 2015; Shang et al., 2015). However, this approach leaves many questions unanswered as an understanding of the precise successes and shortcomings of each model is hard to assess. A contrasting recent proposal are the bAbI tasks (Weston et al., 2015b) which are synthetic data that measure the ability of learning machines at various reasoning tasks over toy language. Unfortunately, those tests are very small and hence may encourage methods that do not scale. In this work, we propose a suite of new tasks of a much larger scale that attempt to bridge the gap between the two regimes. Choosing the domain of movies, we provide tasks that test the ability of models to answer factual questions (utilizing OMDB), provide personalization (utilizing MovieLens), carry short conversations about the two, and finally to perform on natural dialogs from Reddit. We provide a dataset covering 75k movie entities and with 3.5M training examples. We present results of various models on these tasks, and evaluate their performance.

The current workflow for Information Extraction (IE) analysts involves the definition of the entities/relations of interest and a training corpus with annotated examples. In this demonstration we introduce a new workflow where the analyst directly verbalizes the entities/relations, which are then used by a Textual Entailment model to perform zero-shot IE. We present the design and implementation of a toolkit with a user interface, as well as experiments on four IE tasks that show that the system achieves very good performance at zero-shot learning using only 5--15 minutes per type of a user's effort. Our demonstration system is open-sourced at https://github.com/BBN-E/ZS4IE . A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/676138340 .

Passage ranking involves two stages: passage retrieval and passage re-ranking, which are important and challenging topics for both academics and industries in the area of Information Retrieval (IR). However, the commonly-used datasets for passage ranking usually focus on the English language. For non-English scenarios, such as Chinese, the existing datasets are limited in terms of data scale, fine-grained relevance annotation and false negative issues. To address this problem, we introduce T2Ranking, a large-scale Chinese benchmark for passage ranking. T2Ranking comprises more than 300K queries and over 2M unique passages from real-world search engines. Expert annotators are recruited to provide 4-level graded relevance scores (fine-grained) for query-passage pairs instead of binary relevance judgments (coarse-grained). To ease the false negative issues, more passages with higher diversities are considered when performing relevance annotations, especially in the test set, to ensure a more accurate evaluation. Apart from the textual query and passage data, other auxiliary resources are also provided, such as query types and XML files of documents which passages are generated from, to facilitate further studies. To evaluate the dataset, commonly used ranking models are implemented and tested on T2Ranking as baselines. The experimental results show that T2Ranking is challenging and there is still scope for improvement. The full data and all codes are available at https://github.com/THUIR/T2Ranking/