Evaluation of text generation to date has primarily focused on content created sequentially, rather than improvements on a piece of text. Writing, however, is naturally an iterative and incremental process that requires expertise in different modular skills such as fixing outdated information or making the writing style more consistent. Even so, comprehensive evaluation of a model’s capacity to perform these skills and the ability to edit remains sparse. This work introduces EditEval: An instruction-based, benchmark and evaluation suite that leverages high-quality existing and new datasets in English for the automatic evaluation of editing capabilities, such as making text more cohesive and paraphrasing. We evaluate several pre-trained models, which shows that InstructGPT and PEER on average perform the best, but that most baselines fall below the supervised state-of-the-art, particularly when neutralizing and updating information. Our analysis also shows that commonly used metrics for editing tasks do not always correlate well, and that prompts leading to the strongest performance do not necessarily elicit strong performance across different models. Through the release of this benchmark (code and data available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EditEval) and a publicly available leaderboard challenge, we hope to unlock future work on developing models more capable of controllable and iterative editing.

We study the problem of retrieval with instructions, where users provide explicit descriptions of their intent along with their queries to guide a retrieval system. Our solution is a general-purpose task-aware retrieval system, trained using multi-task instruction tuning and can follow human-written instructions to find relevant documents to a given query. We introduce the first large-scale collection of 37 retrieval datasets with instructions, BERRI, and present TART, a single multi-task retrieval system trained on BERRI with instructions that can adapt to a new task without any parameter updates. TART advances the state of the art on two zero-shot retrieval benchmarks, BEIR and LOTTE, outperforming models up to three times larger. We further introduce a new evaluation setup, X2-Retrieval, to better reflect real-world scenarios in which diverse domains and tasks are pooled. TART significantly outperforms competitive baselines in this setup, further highlighting the effectiveness of guiding retrieval with instructions.

Generative models for open domain question answering have proven to be competitive, without resorting to external knowledge. While promising, this approach requires to use models with billions of parameters, which are expensive to train and query. In this paper, we investigate how much these models can benefit from retrieving text passages, potentially containing evidence. We obtain state-of-the-art results on the Natural Questions and TriviaQA open benchmarks. Interestingly, we observe that the performance of this method significantly improves when increasing the number of retrieved passages. This is evidence that sequence-to-sequence models offers a flexible framework to efficiently aggregate and combine evidence from multiple passages.