Despite the remarkable ability of large language models (LMs) to comprehend and generate language, they have a tendency to hallucinate and create factually inaccurate output. Augmenting LMs by retrieving information from external knowledge resources is one promising solution. Most existing retrieval augmented LMs employ a retrieve-and-generate setup that only retrieves information once based on the input. This is limiting, however, in more general scenarios involving generation of long texts, where continually gathering information throughout generation is essential. In this work, we provide a generalized view of active retrieval augmented generation, methods that actively decide when and what to retrieve across the course of the generation. We propose Forward-Looking Active REtrieval augmented generation (FLARE), a generic method which iteratively uses a prediction of the upcoming sentence to anticipate future content, which is then utilized as a query to retrieve relevant documents to regenerate the sentence if it contains low-confidence tokens. We test FLARE along with baselines comprehensively over 4 long-form knowledge-intensive generation tasks/datasets. FLARE achieves superior or competitive performance on all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

While dense retrieval has been shown to be effective and efficient across tasks and languages, it remains difficult to create effective fully zero-shot dense retrieval systems when no relevance labels are available. In this paper, we recognize the difficulty of zero-shot learning and encoding relevance. Instead, we propose to pivot through Hypothetical Document Embeddings (HyDE). Given a query, HyDE first zero-shot prompts an instruction-following language model (e.g., InstructGPT) to generate a hypothetical document. The document captures relevance patterns but is “fake” and may contain hallucinations. Then, an unsupervised contrastively learned encoder (e.g., Contriever) encodes the document into an embedding vector. This vector identifies a neighborhood in the corpus embedding space, from which similar real documents are retrieved based on vector similarity. This second step grounds the generated document to the actual corpus, with the encoder’s dense bottleneck filtering out the hallucinations. Our experiments show that HyDE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised dense retriever Contriever and shows strong performance comparable to fine-tuned retrievers across various tasks (e.g. web search, QA, fact verification) and in non-English languages (e.g., sw, ko, ja, bn).

Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We operationalize the task of recommending datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To facilitate this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present a superior bi-encoder retriever for text-based dataset recommendation. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.

Language models (LMs) now excel at many tasks such as question answering, reasoning, and dialog. However, they sometimes generate unsupported or misleading content. A user cannot easily determine whether their outputs are trustworthy or not, because most LMs do not have any built-in mechanism for attribution to external evidence. To enable attribution while still preserving all the powerful advantages of recent generation models, we propose RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision), a system that 1) automatically finds attribution for the output of any text generation model, and 2) post-edits the output to fix unsupported content while preserving the original output as much as possible. When applied to the output of several state-of-the-art LMs on a diverse set of generation tasks, we find that RARR significantly improves attribution while otherwise preserving the original input to a much greater degree than previously explored edit models. Furthermore, the implementation of RARR requires only a handful of training examples, a large language model, and standard web search.

Recent research demonstrates the effectiveness of using fine-tuned language models (LM) for dense retrieval. However, dense retrievers are hard to train, typically requiring heavily engineered fine-tuning pipelines to realize their full potential. In this paper, we identify and address two underlying problems of dense retrievers: i) fragility to training data noise and ii) requiring large batches to robustly learn the embedding space. We use the recently proposed Condenser pre-training architecture, which learns to condense information into the dense vector through LM pre-training. On top of it, we propose coCondenser, which adds an unsupervised corpus-level contrastive loss to warm up the passage embedding space. Experiments on MS-MARCO, Natural Question, and Trivia QA datasets show that coCondenser removes the need for heavy data engineering such as augmentation, synthesis, or filtering, and the need for large batch training. It shows comparable performance to RocketQA, a state-of-the-art, heavily engineered system, using simple small batch fine-tuning.

Systems for knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering (QA) usually consist of two stages: efficient retrieval of relevant documents from a large corpus and detailed reading of the selected documents. This is usually done through two separate models, a retriever that encodes the query and finds nearest neighbors, and a reader based on Transformers. These two components are usually modeled separately, which necessitates a cumbersome implementation and is awkward to optimize in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we revisit this design and eschew the separate architecture and training in favor of a single Transformer that performs retrieval as attention (RAA), and end-to-end training solely based on supervision from the end QA task. We demonstrate for the first time that an end-to-end trained single Transformer can achieve both competitive retrieval and QA performance on in-domain datasets, matching or even slightly outperforming state-of-the-art dense retrievers and readers. Moreover, end-to-end adaptation of our model significantly boosts its performance on out-of-domain datasets in both supervised and unsupervised settings, making our model a simple and adaptable end-to-end solution for knowledge-intensive tasks.

Contrastive learning has been applied successfully to learn vector representations of text. Previous research demonstrated that learning high-quality representations benefits from batch-wise contrastive loss with a large number of negatives. In practice, the technique of in-batch negative is used, where for each example in a batch, other batch examples’ positives will be taken as its negatives, avoiding encoding extra negatives. This, however, still conditions each example’s loss on all batch examples and requires fitting the entire large batch into GPU memory. This paper introduces a gradient caching technique that decouples backpropagation between contrastive loss and the encoder, removing encoder backward pass data dependency along the batch dimension. As a result, gradients can be computed for one subset of the batch at a time, leading to almost constant memory usage.

Pre-trained Transformer language models (LM) have become go-to text representation encoders. Prior research fine-tunes deep LMs to encode text sequences such as sentences and passages into single dense vector representations for efficient text comparison and retrieval. However, dense encoders require a lot of data and sophisticated techniques to effectively train and suffer in low data situations. This paper finds a key reason is that standard LMs’ internal attention structure is not ready-to-use for dense encoders, which needs to aggregate text information into the dense representation. We propose to pre-train towards dense encoder with a novel Transformer architecture, Condenser, where LM prediction CONditions on DENSE Representation. Our experiments show Condenser improves over standard LM by large margins on various text retrieval and similarity tasks.

Classical information retrieval systems such as BM25 rely on exact lexical match and can carry out search efficiently with inverted list index. Recent neural IR models shifts towards soft matching all query document terms, but they lose the computation efficiency of exact match systems. This paper presents COIL, a contextualized exact match retrieval architecture, where scoring is based on overlapping query document tokens’ contextualized representations. The new architecture stores contextualized token representations in inverted lists, bringing together the efficiency of exact match and the representation power of deep language models. Our experimental results show COIL outperforms classical lexical retrievers and state-of-the-art deep LM retrievers with similar or smaller latency.

Recent innovations in Transformer-based ranking models have advanced the state-of-the-art in information retrieval. However, these Transformers are computationally expensive, and their opaque hidden states make it hard to understand the ranking process. In this work, we modularize the Transformer ranker into separate modules for text representation and interaction. We show how this design enables substantially faster ranking using offline pre-computed representations and light-weight online interactions. The modular design is also easier to interpret and sheds light on the ranking process in Transformer rankers.

To improve the performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for low-resource languages (LRL), one effective strategy is to leverage parallel data from a related high-resource language (HRL). However, multilingual data has been found more beneficial for NMT models that translate from the LRL to a target language than the ones that translate into the LRLs. In this paper, we aim to improve the effectiveness of multilingual transfer for NMT models that translate into the LRL, by designing a better decoder word embedding. Extending upon a general-purpose multilingual encoding method Soft Decoupled Encoding (Wang et al., 2019), we propose DecSDE, an efficient character n-gram based embedding specifically designed for the NMT decoder. Our experiments show that DecSDE leads to consistent gains of up to 1.8 BLEU on translation from English to four different languages.