Daily Papers

Retrieval-augmented QA pipelines often route retrieved passages through an LLM rewriter before a smaller reader, lifting F1 by tens of points on multi-hop benchmarks; this gain is typically credited to improved evidence quality. We ask whether that lift is causally driven by the gold answer string appearing in the rewritten context rather than by curation per se, using a controlled intervention audit. For each rewritten context we re-run the reader after one of four controlled edits to the compile output: removing the gold answer span, replacing a length-matched random non-answer span (placebo), or injecting the gold into rewrites where it was absent (at the prefix or at a midpoint sentence boundary). Across twelve completed (cell, baseline) intervention runs spanning three reader families (Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen3.5-35B, GLM-4.7), two datasets (HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA), and three compiler arrangements (MA-only, MB-only, MA+verify), removing the gold answer drops reader F1 by 28 to 64 points beyond the length-matched placebo on paired answer-in-compile strata, and prepending the gold into rewrites that lacked it raises F1 by +0.7 to +9.7 points in 10 of 12 (cell, baseline) combinations. A companion five-sentinel audit shows the conventional single-[MASK] probe is itself sentinel-fragile: on 2Wiki it reports a +4.12~F1 ``non-leakage residual'' that flips to -3.33 to -7.81~F1 under four alternative sentinels and fails an equivalence test for three of those four (1/4~pass). We do not propose a new rewriter or mitigation; we release the intervention runner and the sentinel panel so that other rewriter-gain claims can be tested against the same standard.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) under a fixed reader-context budget forces a selection problem: of the evidence retrieved, only a fraction can be shown to the reader. We argue that document recall -- the standard retrieval metric -- is the wrong quantity to optimize in this regime, and we make two contributions. First, as a general contribution, we introduce answer-in-context, a diagnostic that measures whether a gold answer survives as a contiguous span in the packed reader context (not the retrieved set). It predicts answer F1 better than recall (r=0.39-0.55 vs. about 0.31), separates answer quality roughly five-fold (0.60 vs. 0.12 on HotpotQA), and carries information beyond retrieval: it adds Delta R squared=0.17 over recall and shows a 4.6x EM gap even among questions where all gold was retrieved. We also confirm it interventionally: on 2WikiMultiHopQA a packing change that raises coverage but not answer-in-context yields no accuracy gain. Second, as a conditional contribution, we cast reader-context construction as budgeted monotone submodular maximization and build a packer that jointly optimizes relevance, query coverage, representativeness, and diversity. On HotpotQA with a 160-token budget and a 3B reader it beats a strong focused heuristic, MMR, and naive packing -- by up to +5.1 F1 at equal-or-lower token cost, across three seeds. Crucially, we map the scope of this win honestly: it requires the conjunction of (i) multi-hop complementary structure, (ii) retrieval that surfaces the evidence, (iii) a binding but not extreme budget, and (iv) a reader weak enough that evidence density, not reading capacity, is the bottleneck. A quantization-controlled reader-scale ladder (3B to 7B to 14B) shows the edge over the heuristic is absorbed by 7B and significantly reverses by 14B, while the diagnostic explains every boundary with a single variable.

Models for reading comprehension (RC) commonly restrict their output space to the set of all single contiguous spans from the input, in order to alleviate the learning problem and avoid the need for a model that generates text explicitly. However, forcing an answer to be a single span can be restrictive, and some recent datasets also include multi-span questions, i.e., questions whose answer is a set of non-contiguous spans in the text. Naturally, models that return single spans cannot answer these questions. In this work, we propose a simple architecture for answering multi-span questions by casting the task as a sequence tagging problem, namely, predicting for each input token whether it should be part of the output or not. Our model substantially improves performance on span extraction questions from DROP and Quoref by 9.9 and 5.5 EM points respectively.

In several question answering benchmarks, pretrained models have reached human parity through fine-tuning on an order of 100,000 annotated questions and answers. We explore the more realistic few-shot setting, where only a few hundred training examples are available, and observe that standard models perform poorly, highlighting the discrepancy between current pretraining objectives and question answering. We propose a new pretraining scheme tailored for question answering: recurring span selection. Given a passage with multiple sets of recurring spans, we mask in each set all recurring spans but one, and ask the model to select the correct span in the passage for each masked span. Masked spans are replaced with a special token, viewed as a question representation, that is later used during fine-tuning to select the answer span. The resulting model obtains surprisingly good results on multiple benchmarks (e.g., 72.7 F1 on SQuAD with only 128 training examples), while maintaining competitive performance in the high-resource setting.

The sheer volume of financial statements makes it difficult for humans to access and analyze a business's financials. Robust numerical reasoning likewise faces unique challenges in this domain. In this work, we focus on answering deep questions over financial data, aiming to automate the analysis of a large corpus of financial documents. In contrast to existing tasks on general domain, the finance domain includes complex numerical reasoning and understanding of heterogeneous representations. To facilitate analytical progress, we propose a new large-scale dataset, FinQA, with Question-Answering pairs over Financial reports, written by financial experts. We also annotate the gold reasoning programs to ensure full explainability. We further introduce baselines and conduct comprehensive experiments in our dataset. The results demonstrate that popular, large, pre-trained models fall far short of expert humans in acquiring finance knowledge and in complex multi-step numerical reasoning on that knowledge. Our dataset -- the first of its kind -- should therefore enable significant, new community research into complex application domains. The dataset and code are publicly availablehttps://github.com/czyssrs/FinQA.

It is challenging for current one-step retrieve-and-read question answering (QA) systems to answer questions like "Which novel by the author of 'Armada' will be adapted as a feature film by Steven Spielberg?" because the question seldom contains retrievable clues about the missing entity (here, the author). Answering such a question requires multi-hop reasoning where one must gather information about the missing entity (or facts) to proceed with further reasoning. We present GoldEn (Gold Entity) Retriever, which iterates between reading context and retrieving more supporting documents to answer open-domain multi-hop questions. Instead of using opaque and computationally expensive neural retrieval models, GoldEn Retriever generates natural language search queries given the question and available context, and leverages off-the-shelf information retrieval systems to query for missing entities. This allows GoldEn Retriever to scale up efficiently for open-domain multi-hop reasoning while maintaining interpretability. We evaluate GoldEn Retriever on the recently proposed open-domain multi-hop QA dataset, HotpotQA, and demonstrate that it outperforms the best previously published model despite not using pretrained language models such as BERT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential of facilitating the development of Artificial Intelligence technology to assist medical experts for interactive decision support, which has been demonstrated by their competitive performances in Medical QA. However, while impressive, the required quality bar for medical applications remains far from being achieved. Currently, LLMs remain challenged by outdated knowledge and by their tendency to generate hallucinated content. Furthermore, most benchmarks to assess medical knowledge lack reference gold explanations which means that it is not possible to evaluate the reasoning of LLMs predictions. Finally, the situation is particularly grim if we consider benchmarking LLMs for languages other than English which remains, as far as we know, a totally neglected topic. In order to address these shortcomings, in this paper we present MedExpQA, the first multilingual benchmark based on medical exams to evaluate LLMs in Medical Question Answering. To the best of our knowledge, MedExpQA includes for the first time reference gold explanations written by medical doctors which can be leveraged to establish various gold-based upper-bounds for comparison with LLMs performance. Comprehensive multilingual experimentation using both the gold reference explanations and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches show that performance of LLMs still has large room for improvement, especially for languages other than English. Furthermore, and despite using state-of-the-art RAG methods, our results also demonstrate the difficulty of obtaining and integrating readily available medical knowledge that may positively impact results on downstream evaluations for Medical Question Answering. So far the benchmark is available in four languages, but we hope that this work may encourage further development to other languages.

Multi-hop question answering requires models to gather information from different parts of a text to answer a question. Most current approaches learn to address this task in an end-to-end way with neural networks, without maintaining an explicit representation of the reasoning process. We propose a method to extract a discrete reasoning chain over the text, which consists of a series of sentences leading to the answer. We then feed the extracted chains to a BERT-based QA model to do final answer prediction. Critically, we do not rely on gold annotated chains or "supporting facts:" at training time, we derive pseudogold reasoning chains using heuristics based on named entity recognition and coreference resolution. Nor do we rely on these annotations at test time, as our model learns to extract chains from raw text alone. We test our approach on two recently proposed large multi-hop question answering datasets: WikiHop and HotpotQA, and achieve state-of-art performance on WikiHop and strong performance on HotpotQA. Our analysis shows the properties of chains that are crucial for high performance: in particular, modeling extraction sequentially is important, as is dealing with each candidate sentence in a context-aware way. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that our extracted chains allow humans to give answers with high confidence, indicating that these are a strong intermediate abstraction for this task.

Generative models have recently started to outperform extractive models in Open Domain Question Answering, largely by leveraging their decoder to attend over multiple encoded passages and combining their information. However, generative models tend to be larger than extractive models due to the need for a decoder, run slower during inference due to auto-regressive decoder beam search, and their generated output often suffers from hallucinations. We propose to extend transformer encoders with the ability to fuse information from multiple passages, using global representation to provide cross-sample attention over all tokens across samples. Furthermore, we propose an alternative answer span probability calculation to better aggregate answer scores in the global space of all samples. Using our proposed method, we outperform the current state-of-the-art method by 2.5 Exact Match score on the Natural Question dataset while using only 25% of parameters and 35% of the latency during inference, and 4.4 Exact Match on WebQuestions dataset. When coupled with synthetic data augmentation, we outperform larger models on the TriviaQA dataset as well. The latency and parameter savings of our method make it particularly attractive for open-domain question answering, as these models are often compute-intensive.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) in the biomedical domain requires benchmarks that can distinguish reasoning from pattern matching and remain discriminative as model capabilities improve. Existing biomedical question answering (QA) benchmarks are limited in this respect. Multiple-choice formats can allow models to succeed through answer elimination rather than inference, while widely circulated exam-style datasets are increasingly vulnerable to performance saturation and training data contamination. Multi-hop reasoning, defined as the ability to integrate information across multiple sources to derive an answer, is central to clinically meaningful tasks such as diagnostic support, literature-based discovery, and hypothesis generation, yet remains underrepresented in current biomedical QA benchmarks. MedHopQA is a disease-centered multi-hop reasoning benchmark consisting of 1,000 expert-curated question-answer pairs introduced as a shared task at BioCreative IX. Each question requires synthesis of information across two distinct Wikipedia articles, and answers are provided in an open-ended free-text format. Gold annotations are augmented with ontology-grounded synonym sets from MONDO, NCBI Gene, and NCBI Taxonomy to support both lexical and concept-level evaluation. MedHopQA was constructed through a structured process combining human annotation, triage, iterative verification, and LLM-as-a-judge validation. To reduce leaderboard gaming and contamination risk, the 1,000 scored questions are embedded within a publicly downloadable set of 10,000 questions, with answers withheld, on a CodaBench leaderboard. MedHopQA provides both a benchmark and a reusable framework for constructing future biomedical QA datasets that prioritize compositional reasoning, saturation resistance, and contamination resistance as core design constraints.

Many real-world questions over business, legal, and scientific corpora are natural-language versions of database-style queries over records latent in text. Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are optimized primarily for semantic relevance, but retrieving plausible passages does not guarantee correct query execution. We introduce QO-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for query-operator question answering over typed event tuples. The benchmark covers 22,984 news articles and 614 corporate events across 18 query templates, evaluated on 785 questions. Each gold answer is deterministically computed from typed event tuples and scored by recall, with answers matched to the gold tuples by exact match rather than an LLM judge. This design enables operator-level diagnosis such as joins and intersection. We evaluate RAG, ReAct RAG, GraphRAG, and information-extraction-to-SQL under matched conditions, with a long-context oracle ceiling to isolate retrieval failure. A two-axis framework -- index-time preservation versus query-time execution -- predicts where each paradigm fails, and the results bear it out: systems retrieve relevant text but discard the typed values operators need, and the deployable paradigm ranking inverts across operators, with similarity retrieval leading on filter/project and extraction-to-SQL on intersection and counting. Even given the gold evidence, a long-context oracle stays far from saturated, so operator execution -- not retrieval alone -- is a core bottleneck that a stronger answer model does not remove. QO-Bench reframes the goal from passage relevance to query-operator-preserving retrieval.

We introduce the first large-scale corpus for long-form question answering, a task requiring elaborate and in-depth answers to open-ended questions. The dataset comprises 270K threads from the Reddit forum ``Explain Like I'm Five'' (ELI5) where an online community provides answers to questions which are comprehensible by five year olds. Compared to existing datasets, ELI5 comprises diverse questions requiring multi-sentence answers. We provide a large set of web documents to help answer the question. Automatic and human evaluations show that an abstractive model trained with a multi-task objective outperforms conventional Seq2Seq, language modeling, as well as a strong extractive baseline. However, our best model is still far from human performance since raters prefer gold responses in over 86% of cases, leaving ample opportunity for future improvement.

Despite the number of currently available datasets on video question answering, there still remains a need for a dataset involving multi-step and non-factoid answers. Moreover, relying on video transcripts remains an under-explored topic. To adequately address this, We propose a new question answering task on instructional videos, because of their verbose and narrative nature. While previous studies on video question answering have focused on generating a short text as an answer, given a question and video clip, our task aims to identify a span of a video segment as an answer which contains instructional details with various granularities. This work focuses on screencast tutorial videos pertaining to an image editing program. We introduce a dataset, TutorialVQA, consisting of about 6,000manually collected triples of (video, question, answer span). We also provide experimental results with several baselines algorithms using the video transcripts. The results indicate that the task is challenging and call for the investigation of new algorithms.

We present STARC (Structured Annotations for Reading Comprehension), a new annotation framework for assessing reading comprehension with multiple choice questions. Our framework introduces a principled structure for the answer choices and ties them to textual span annotations. The framework is implemented in OneStopQA, a new high-quality dataset for evaluation and analysis of reading comprehension in English. We use this dataset to demonstrate that STARC can be leveraged for a key new application for the development of SAT-like reading comprehension materials: automatic annotation quality probing via span ablation experiments. We further show that it enables in-depth analyses and comparisons between machine and human reading comprehension behavior, including error distributions and guessing ability. Our experiments also reveal that the standard multiple choice dataset in NLP, RACE, is limited in its ability to measure reading comprehension. 47% of its questions can be guessed by machines without accessing the passage, and 18% are unanimously judged by humans as not having a unique correct answer. OneStopQA provides an alternative test set for reading comprehension which alleviates these shortcomings and has a substantially higher human ceiling performance.

AI has achieved remarkable mastery over games such as Chess, Go, and Poker, and even Jeopardy, but the rich variety of standardized exams has remained a landmark challenge. Even in 2016, the best AI system achieved merely 59.3% on an 8th Grade science exam challenge. This paper reports unprecedented success on the Grade 8 New York Regents Science Exam, where for the first time a system scores more than 90% on the exam's non-diagram, multiple choice (NDMC) questions. In addition, our Aristo system, building upon the success of recent language models, exceeded 83% on the corresponding Grade 12 Science Exam NDMC questions. The results, on unseen test questions, are robust across different test years and different variations of this kind of test. They demonstrate that modern NLP methods can result in mastery on this task. While not a full solution to general question-answering (the questions are multiple choice, and the domain is restricted to 8th Grade science), it represents a significant milestone for the field.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a popular application for large language models. It is preferable that successful RAG systems provide accurate answers that are supported by being grounded in a passage without any hallucinations. While considerable work is required for building a full RAG pipeline, being able to benchmark performance is also necessary. We present ClapNQ, a benchmark Long-form Question Answering dataset for the full RAG pipeline. ClapNQ includes long answers with grounded gold passages from Natural Questions (NQ) and a corpus to perform either retrieval, generation, or the full RAG pipeline. The ClapNQ answers are concise, 3x smaller than the full passage, and cohesive, meaning that the answer is composed fluently, often by integrating multiple pieces of the passage that are not contiguous. RAG models must adapt to these properties to be successful at ClapNQ. We present baseline experiments and analysis for ClapNQ that highlight areas where there is still significant room for improvement in grounded RAG. CLAPNQ is publicly available at https://github.com/primeqa/clapnq

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges with needle-in-a-haystack tasks, where relevant information ("the needle") must be drawn from a large pool of irrelevant context ("the haystack"). Previous studies have highlighted positional bias and distractor quantity as critical factors affecting model performance, yet the influence of gold context size has received little attention. We address this gap by systematically studying how variations in gold context length impact LLM performance on long-context question answering tasks. Our experiments reveal that LLM performance drops sharply when the gold context is shorter, i.e., smaller gold contexts consistently degrade model performance and amplify positional sensitivity, posing a major challenge for agentic systems that must integrate scattered, fine-grained information of varying lengths. This pattern holds across three diverse domains (general knowledge, biomedical reasoning, and mathematical reasoning) and seven state-of-the-art LLMs of various sizes and architectures. Our work provides clear insights to guide the design of robust, context-aware LLM-driven systems.

When evaluating large language models (LLMs) with multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), it is common to end the prompt with the string "Answer:" to facilitate automated answer extraction via next-token probabilities. However, there is no consensus on how to tokenize the space following the colon, often overlooked as a trivial choice. In this paper, we uncover accuracy differences of up to 11% due to this (seemingly irrelevant) tokenization variation as well as reshuffled model rankings, raising concerns about the reliability of LLM comparisons in prior work. Surprisingly, we are able to recommend one specific strategy -- tokenizing the space together with the answer letter -- as we observe consistent and statistically significant performance improvements. Additionally, it improves model calibration, enhancing the reliability of the model's confidence estimates. Our findings underscore the importance of careful evaluation design and highlight the need for standardized, transparent evaluation protocols to ensure reliable and comparable results.

Long-form answers, consisting of multiple sentences, can provide nuanced and comprehensive answers to a broader set of questions. To better understand this complex and understudied task, we study the functional structure of long-form answers collected from three datasets, ELI5, WebGPT and Natural Questions. Our main goal is to understand how humans organize information to craft complex answers. We develop an ontology of six sentence-level functional roles for long-form answers, and annotate 3.9k sentences in 640 answer paragraphs. Different answer collection methods manifest in different discourse structures. We further analyze model-generated answers -- finding that annotators agree less with each other when annotating model-generated answers compared to annotating human-written answers. Our annotated data enables training a strong classifier that can be used for automatic analysis. We hope our work can inspire future research on discourse-level modeling and evaluation of long-form QA systems.

We demonstrate an end-to-end question answering system that integrates BERT with the open-source Anserini information retrieval toolkit. In contrast to most question answering and reading comprehension models today, which operate over small amounts of input text, our system integrates best practices from IR with a BERT-based reader to identify answers from a large corpus of Wikipedia articles in an end-to-end fashion. We report large improvements over previous results on a standard benchmark test collection, showing that fine-tuning pretrained BERT with SQuAD is sufficient to achieve high accuracy in identifying answer spans.

We present SpanBERT, a pre-training method that is designed to better represent and predict spans of text. Our approach extends BERT by (1) masking contiguous random spans, rather than random tokens, and (2) training the span boundary representations to predict the entire content of the masked span, without relying on the individual token representations within it. SpanBERT consistently outperforms BERT and our better-tuned baselines, with substantial gains on span selection tasks such as question answering and coreference resolution. In particular, with the same training data and model size as BERT-large, our single model obtains 94.6% and 88.7% F1 on SQuAD 1.1 and 2.0, respectively. We also achieve a new state of the art on the OntoNotes coreference resolution task (79.6\% F1), strong performance on the TACRED relation extraction benchmark, and even show gains on GLUE.

Answer sentence selection is the task of identifying sentences that contain the answer to a given question. This is an important problem in its own right as well as in the larger context of open domain question answering. We propose a novel approach to solving this task via means of distributed representations, and learn to match questions with answers by considering their semantic encoding. This contrasts prior work on this task, which typically relies on classifiers with large numbers of hand-crafted syntactic and semantic features and various external resources. Our approach does not require any feature engineering nor does it involve specialist linguistic data, making this model easily applicable to a wide range of domains and languages. Experimental results on a standard benchmark dataset from TREC demonstrate that---despite its simplicity---our model matches state of the art performance on the answer sentence selection task.

Medical reasoning models (MRMs) achieve superior performance on medical benchmarks compared to medical LLMs; however, high accuracy alone is insufficient for practical deployment. One of such requirements for real-world application is robustness to varying output constraints. Specifically, posing the same medical question while requesting different answer formats should not affect the underlying correctness of the response. We investigate this phenomenon in this paper, focusing on MRMs. To quantify this behavior, we propose the metric answer-format robustness: the ability to reliably generate correct outputs across varying specified formats. We examine three representative formats: multiple-choice, open-ended question-answering, and ranked lists. Across 15 proprietary and open-weight models, we observe substantial variation in format robustness (35-100%). Furthermore, we conduct controlled fine-tuning experiments on a shared backbone with matched training data to isolate the effects of the fine-tuning paradigm. We find that supervised fine-tuning yields more stable behavior across formats, whereas reinforcement fine-tuning often exhibits higher cross-format brittleness, with the degree of instability strongly dependent on reward design. Overall, answer-format robustness in MRMs is trainable yet brittle and requires careful evaluation for practical medical use.

We present a new question set, text corpus, and baselines assembled to encourage AI research in advanced question answering. Together, these constitute the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC), which requires far more powerful knowledge and reasoning than previous challenges such as SQuAD or SNLI. The ARC question set is partitioned into a Challenge Set and an Easy Set, where the Challenge Set contains only questions answered incorrectly by both a retrieval-based algorithm and a word co-occurence algorithm. The dataset contains only natural, grade-school science questions (authored for human tests), and is the largest public-domain set of this kind (7,787 questions). We test several baselines on the Challenge Set, including leading neural models from the SQuAD and SNLI tasks, and find that none are able to significantly outperform a random baseline, reflecting the difficult nature of this task. We are also releasing the ARC Corpus, a corpus of 14M science sentences relevant to the task, and implementations of the three neural baseline models tested. Can your model perform better? We pose ARC as a challenge to the community.

We introduce a high-quality dataset that contains 3,397 samples comprising (i) multiple choice questions, (ii) answers (including distractors), and (iii) their source documents, from the educational domain. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and close. Correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom's taxonomy. All questions have been generated by educational experts rather than crowd workers to ensure they are maintaining educational and learning standards. Our analysis and experiments suggest distinguishable differences between our dataset and commonly used ones for question generation for educational purposes. We believe this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in the educational domain. The dataset and baselines will be released to support further research in question generation.

We propose two new methods for multi-document financial question answering. First, a method that uses semantic tagging, and then, queries the index to get the context (RAG_SEM). And second, a Knowledge Graph (KG_RAG) based method that uses semantic tagging, and, retrieves knowledge graph triples from a graph database, as context. KG_RAG uses knowledge graphs constructed using a small model that is fine-tuned using knowledge distillation using a large teacher model. The data consists of 18 10K reports of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, NVIDIA, Amazon and Tesla for the years 2021, 2022 and 2023. The list of questions in the data consists of 111 complex questions including many esoteric questions that are difficult to answer and the answers are not completely obvious. As evaluation metrics, we use overall scores as well as segmented scores for measurement including the faithfulness, relevance, correctness, similarity, an LLM based overall score and the rouge scores as well as a similarity of embeddings. We find that both methods outperform plain RAG significantly. KG_RAG outperforms RAG_SEM in four out of nine metrics.

Mathematical reasoning, a core ability of human intelligence, presents unique challenges for machines in abstract thinking and logical reasoning. Recent large pre-trained language models such as GPT-3 have achieved remarkable progress on mathematical reasoning tasks written in text form, such as math word problems (MWP). However, it is unknown if the models can handle more complex problems that involve math reasoning over heterogeneous information, such as tabular data. To fill the gap, we present Tabular Math Word Problems (TabMWP), a new dataset containing 38,431 open-domain grade-level problems that require mathematical reasoning on both textual and tabular data. Each question in TabMWP is aligned with a tabular context, which is presented as an image, semi-structured text, and a structured table. There are two types of questions: free-text and multi-choice, and each problem is annotated with gold solutions to reveal the multi-step reasoning process. We evaluate different pre-trained models on TabMWP, including the GPT-3 model in a few-shot setting. As earlier studies suggest, since few-shot GPT-3 relies on the selection of in-context examples, its performance is unstable and can degrade to near chance. The unstable issue is more severe when handling complex problems like TabMWP. To mitigate this, we further propose a novel approach, PromptPG, which utilizes policy gradient to learn to select in-context examples from a small amount of training data and then constructs the corresponding prompt for the test example. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the best baseline by 5.31% on the accuracy metric and reduces the prediction variance significantly compared to random selection, which verifies its effectiveness in selecting in-context examples.

Over the last few years, machine learning based methods have been applied to extract information from news flow in the financial domain. However, this information has mostly been in the form of the financial sentiments contained in the news headlines, primarily for the stock prices. In our current work, we propose that various other dimensions of information can be extracted from news headlines, which will be of interest to investors, policy-makers and other practitioners. We propose a framework that extracts information such as past movements and expected directionality in prices, asset comparison and other general information that the news is referring to. We apply this framework to the commodity "Gold" and train the machine learning models using a dataset of 11,412 human-annotated news headlines (released with this study), collected from the period 2000-2019. We experiment to validate the causal effect of news flow on gold prices and observe that the information produced from our framework significantly impacts the future gold price.

Recent work on open domain question answering (QA) assumes strong supervision of the supporting evidence and/or assumes a blackbox information retrieval (IR) system to retrieve evidence candidates. We argue that both are suboptimal, since gold evidence is not always available, and QA is fundamentally different from IR. We show for the first time that it is possible to jointly learn the retriever and reader from question-answer string pairs and without any IR system. In this setting, evidence retrieval from all of Wikipedia is treated as a latent variable. Since this is impractical to learn from scratch, we pre-train the retriever with an Inverse Cloze Task. We evaluate on open versions of five QA datasets. On datasets where the questioner already knows the answer, a traditional IR system such as BM25 is sufficient. On datasets where a user is genuinely seeking an answer, we show that learned retrieval is crucial, outperforming BM25 by up to 19 points in exact match.

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can be tailored to adhere to human instructions through instruction tuning. However, due to shifts in the distribution of test-time data, they may not always execute instructions accurately, potentially generating factual errors or misaligned content when acting as chat assistants. To enhance the reliability of LLMs in following instructions, we propose the study of selective instruction following, whereby the system declines to execute instructions if the anticipated response quality is low. We train judge models that can predict numerical quality scores for model responses. To address data scarcity, we introduce Self-J, a novel self-training framework for developing judge models without needing human-annotated quality scores. Our method leverages the model's inherent self-evaluation capability to extract information about response quality from labeled instruction-tuning data. It incorporates a gold reference answer to facilitate self-evaluation and recalibrates by assessing the semantic similarity between the response sample and the gold reference. During the training phase, we implement self-distillation as a regularization technique to enhance the capability of reference-free estimation. To validate alignment evaluation on general instruction-following tasks, we collect large-scale high-quality instructions from Hugging Face for model training and evaluation. Extensive experiments on five open-source models show that our method correlates much more with GPT-4 than strong baselines, e.g., supervised models distilled from GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-turbo. Our analysis shows our model's strong generalization across domains. Additionally, our judge models serve as good reward models, e.g., boosting WizardLM-13B-V1.2 from 89.17 to 92.48 and from 12.03 to 15.90 in version v1 and v2 of AlpacaEval respectively using best-of-32 sampling with our judge models.

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 paper presents two effective approaches for Extractive Question Answering (QA) on the Quran. It addresses challenges related to complex language, unique terminology, and deep meaning in the text. The second uses few-shot prompting with instruction-tuned large language models such as Gemini and DeepSeek. A specialized Arabic prompt framework is developed for span extraction. A strong post-processing system integrates subword alignment, overlap suppression, and semantic filtering. This improves precision and reduces hallucinations. Evaluations show that large language models with Arabic instructions outperform traditional fine-tuned models. The best configuration achieves a pAP10 score of 0.637. The results confirm that prompt-based instruction tuning is effective for low-resource, semantically rich QA tasks.

To enable building and testing models on long-document comprehension, we introduce QuALITY, a multiple-choice QA dataset with context passages in English that have an average length of about 5,000 tokens, much longer than typical current models can process. Unlike in prior work with passages, our questions are written and validated by contributors who have read the entire passage, rather than relying on summaries or excerpts. In addition, only half of the questions are answerable by annotators working under tight time constraints, indicating that skimming and simple search are not enough to consistently perform well. Our baseline models perform poorly on this task (55.4%) and significantly lag behind human performance (93.5%).

Recent coreference resolution models rely heavily on span representations to find coreference links between word spans. As the number of spans is O(n^2) in the length of text and the number of potential links is O(n^4), various pruning techniques are necessary to make this approach computationally feasible. We propose instead to consider coreference links between individual words rather than word spans and then reconstruct the word spans. This reduces the complexity of the coreference model to O(n^2) and allows it to consider all potential mentions without pruning any of them out. We also demonstrate that, with these changes, SpanBERT for coreference resolution will be significantly outperformed by RoBERTa. While being highly efficient, our model performs competitively with recent coreference resolution systems on the OntoNotes benchmark.

In the continuously advancing AI landscape, crafting context-rich and meaningful responses via Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential. Researchers are becoming more aware of the challenges that LLMs with fewer parameters encounter when trying to provide suitable answers to open-ended questions. To address these hurdles, the integration of cutting-edge strategies, augmentation of rich external domain knowledge to LLMs, offers significant improvements. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines graph-driven context retrieval in conjunction to knowledge graphs based enhancement, honing the proficiency of LLMs, especially in domain specific community question answering platforms like AskUbuntu, Unix, and ServerFault. We conduct experiments on various LLMs with different parameter sizes to evaluate their ability to ground knowledge and determine factual accuracy in answers to open-ended questions. Our methodology GraphContextGen consistently outperforms dominant text-based retrieval systems, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability to a larger number of use cases. This advancement highlights the importance of pairing context rich data retrieval with LLMs, offering a renewed approach to knowledge sourcing and generation in AI systems. We also show that, due to rich contextual data retrieval, the crucial entities, along with the generated answer, remain factually coherent with the gold answer.

Question answering (QA) has significantly benefitted from deep learning techniques in recent years. However, domain-specific QA remains a challenge due to the significant amount of data required to train a neural network. This paper studies the answer sentence selection task in the Bible domain and answer questions by selecting relevant verses from the Bible. For this purpose, we create a new dataset BibleQA based on bible trivia questions and propose three neural network models for our task. We pre-train our models on a large-scale QA dataset, SQuAD, and investigate the effect of transferring weights on model accuracy. Furthermore, we also measure the model accuracies with different answer context lengths and different Bible translations. We affirm that transfer learning has a noticeable improvement in the model accuracy. We achieve relatively good results with shorter context lengths, whereas longer context lengths decreased model accuracy. We also find that using a more modern Bible translation in the dataset has a positive effect on the task.

Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) drive interest in scientific applications, necessitating specialized benchmarks such as Earth science. Existing benchmarks either present a general science focus devoid of Earth science specificity or cover isolated subdomains, lacking holistic evaluation. Furthermore, current benchmarks typically neglect the assessment of LLMs' capabilities in open-ended scientific exploration. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and professional benchmark for the Earth sciences, designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in scientific exploration within this domain, spanning from fundamental to advanced levels. Leveraging a corpus of 100,000 research papers, we first construct two Question Answering (QA) datasets: Earth-Iron, which offers extensive question coverage for broad assessment, and Earth-Silver, which features a higher level of difficulty to evaluate professional depth. These datasets encompass five Earth spheres, 114 disciplines, and 11 task categories, assessing foundational knowledge crucial for scientific exploration. Most notably, we introduce Earth-Gold with new metrics, a dataset comprising open-ended multi-turn dialogues specifically designed to evaluate the advanced capabilities of LLMs in scientific exploration, including methodology induction, limitation analysis, and concept proposal. Extensive experiments reveal limitations in 11 leading LLMs across different domains and tasks, highlighting considerable room for improvement in their scientific exploration capabilities. The benchmark is available on https://huggingface.co/ai-earth .

When answering a question, humans utilize the information available across different modalities to synthesize a consistent and complete chain of thought (CoT). This process is normally a black box in the case of deep learning models like large-scale language models. Recently, science question benchmarks have been used to diagnose the multi-hop reasoning ability and interpretability of an AI system. However, existing datasets fail to provide annotations for the answers, or are restricted to the textual-only modality, small scales, and limited domain diversity. To this end, we present Science Question Answering (ScienceQA), a new benchmark that consists of ~21k multimodal multiple choice questions with a diverse set of science topics and annotations of their answers with corresponding lectures and explanations. We further design language models to learn to generate lectures and explanations as the chain of thought (CoT) to mimic the multi-hop reasoning process when answering ScienceQA questions. ScienceQA demonstrates the utility of CoT in language models, as CoT improves the question answering performance by 1.20% in few-shot GPT-3 and 3.99% in fine-tuned UnifiedQA. We also explore the upper bound for models to leverage explanations by feeding those in the input; we observe that it improves the few-shot performance of GPT-3 by 18.96%. Our analysis further shows that language models, similar to humans, benefit from explanations to learn from fewer data and achieve the same performance with just 40% of the data. The data and code are available at https://scienceqa.github.io.

We introduce GDPval, a benchmark evaluating AI model capabilities on real-world economically valuable tasks. GDPval covers the majority of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Work Activities for 44 occupations across the top 9 sectors contributing to U.S. GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Tasks are constructed from the representative work of industry professionals with an average of 14 years of experience. We find that frontier model performance on GDPval is improving roughly linearly over time, and that the current best frontier models are approaching industry experts in deliverable quality. We analyze the potential for frontier models, when paired with human oversight, to perform GDPval tasks cheaper and faster than unaided experts. We also demonstrate that increased reasoning effort, increased task context, and increased scaffolding improves model performance on GDPval. Finally, we open-source a gold subset of 220 tasks and provide a public automated grading service at evals.openai.com to facilitate future research in understanding real-world model capabilities.

We introduce Legal RAG Bench, a benchmark and evaluation methodology for assessing the end-to-end performance of legal RAG systems. As a benchmark, Legal RAG Bench consists of 4,876 passages from the Victorian Criminal Charge Book alongside 100 complex, hand-crafted questions demanding expert knowledge of criminal law and procedure. Both long-form answers and supporting passages are provided. As an evaluation methodology, Legal RAG Bench leverages a full factorial design and novel hierarchical error decomposition framework, enabling apples-to-apples comparisons of the contributions of retrieval and reasoning models in RAG. We evaluate three state-of-the-art embedding models (Isaacus' Kanon 2 Embedder, Google's Gemini Embedding 001, and OpenAI's Text Embedding 3 Large) and two frontier LLMs (Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5.2), finding that information retrieval is the primary driver of legal RAG performance, with LLMs exerting a more moderate effect on correctness and groundedness. Kanon 2 Embedder, in particular, had the largest positive impact on performance, improving average correctness by 17.5 points, groundedness by 4.5 points, and retrieval accuracy by 34 points. We observe that many errors attributed to hallucinations in legal RAG systems are in fact triggered by retrieval failures, concluding that retrieval sets the ceiling for the performance of many modern legal RAG systems. We document why and how we built Legal RAG Bench alongside the results of our evaluations. We also openly release our code and data to assist with reproduction of our findings.

We introduce a large scale MAchine Reading COmprehension dataset, which we name MS MARCO. The dataset comprises of 1,010,916 anonymized questions---sampled from Bing's search query logs---each with a human generated answer and 182,669 completely human rewritten generated answers. In addition, the dataset contains 8,841,823 passages---extracted from 3,563,535 web documents retrieved by Bing---that provide the information necessary for curating the natural language answers. A question in the MS MARCO dataset may have multiple answers or no answers at all. Using this dataset, we propose three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (i) predict if a question is answerable given a set of context passages, and extract and synthesize the answer as a human would (ii) generate a well-formed answer (if possible) based on the context passages that can be understood with the question and passage context, and finally (iii) rank a set of retrieved passages given a question. The size of the dataset and the fact that the questions are derived from real user search queries distinguishes MS MARCO from other well-known publicly available datasets for machine reading comprehension and question-answering. We believe that the scale and the real-world nature of this dataset makes it attractive for benchmarking machine reading comprehension and question-answering models.

In the last years, there have been significant developments in the area of Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA). Despite all the notable advancements, current KGQA datasets only provide the answers as the direct output result of the formal query, rather than full sentences incorporating question context. For achieving coherent answers sentence with the question's vocabulary, template-based verbalization so are usually employed for a better representation of answers, which in turn require extensive expert intervention. Thus, making way for machine learning approaches; however, there is a scarcity of datasets that empower machine learning models in this area. Hence, we provide the VANiLLa dataset which aims at reducing this gap by offering answers in natural language sentences. The answer sentences in this dataset are syntactically and semantically closer to the question than to the triple fact. Our dataset consists of over 100k simple questions adapted from the CSQA and SimpleQuestionsWikidata datasets and generated using a semi-automatic framework. We also present results of training our dataset on multiple baseline models adapted from current state-of-the-art Natural Language Generation (NLG) architectures. We believe that this dataset will allow researchers to focus on finding suitable methodologies and architectures for answer verbalization.

Finding the right north-star metrics is highly critical for advancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of foundation models, especially given that existing evaluations are either too easy or only focus on getting correct short answers. To address these issues, we present IMO-Bench, a suite of advanced reasoning benchmarks, vetted by a panel of top specialists and that specifically targets the level of the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the most prestigious venue for young mathematicians. IMO-AnswerBench first tests models on 400 diverse Olympiad problems with verifiable short answers. IMO-Proof Bench is the next-level evaluation for proof-writing capabilities, which includes both basic and advanced IMO level problems as well as detailed grading guidelines to facilitate automatic grading. These benchmarks played a crucial role in our historic achievement of the gold-level performance at IMO 2025 with Gemini Deep Think (Luong and Lockhart, 2025). Our model achieved 80.0% on IMO-AnswerBench and 65.7% on the advanced IMO-Proof Bench, surpassing the best non-Gemini models by large margins of 6.9% and 42.4% respectively. We also showed that autograders built with Gemini reasoning correlate well with human evaluations and construct IMO-GradingBench, with 1000 human gradings on proofs, to enable further progress in automatic evaluation of long-form answers. We hope that IMO-Bench will help the community towards advancing robust mathematical reasoning and release it at https://imobench.github.io/.

The African continent lacks enough qualified teachers which hampers the provision of adequate learning support. An AI could potentially augment the efforts of the limited number of teachers, leading to better learning outcomes. Towards that end, this work describes and evaluates the first key output for the NSMQ AI Grand Challenge, which proposes a robust, real-world benchmark for such an AI: "Build an AI to compete live in Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ) competition and win - performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition". The NSMQ is an annual live science and mathematics competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana in which 3 teams of 2 students compete by answering questions across biology, chemistry, physics, and math in 5 rounds over 5 progressive stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. In this work, we built Brilla AI, an AI contestant that we deployed to unofficially compete remotely and live in the Riddles round of the 2023 NSMQ Grand Finale, the first of its kind in the 30-year history of the competition. Brilla AI is currently available as a web app that livestreams the Riddles round of the contest, and runs 4 machine learning systems: (1) speech to text (2) question extraction (3) question answering and (4) text to speech that work together in real-time to quickly and accurately provide an answer, and then say it with a Ghanaian accent. In its debut, our AI answered one of the 4 riddles ahead of the 3 human contesting teams, unofficially placing second (tied). Improvements and extensions of this AI could potentially be deployed to offer science tutoring to students and eventually enable millions across Africa to have one-on-one learning interactions, democratizing science education.

The integration of retrieved passages and large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPTs, has significantly contributed to improving open-domain question answering. However, there is still a lack of exploration regarding the optimal approach for incorporating retrieved passages into the answer generation process. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating different methods of combining retrieved passages with LLMs to enhance answer generation. We begin by examining the limitations of a commonly-used concatenation approach. Surprisingly, this approach often results in generating "unknown" outputs, even when the correct document is among the top-k retrieved passages. To address this issue, we explore four alternative strategies for integrating the retrieved passages with the LLMs. These strategies include two single-round methods that utilize chain-of-thought reasoning and two multi-round strategies that incorporate feedback loops. Through comprehensive analyses and experiments, we provide insightful observations on how to effectively leverage retrieved passages to enhance the answer generation capability of LLMs.

Recent machine translation (MT) metrics calibrate their effectiveness by correlating with human judgement but without any insights about their behaviour across different error types. Challenge sets are used to probe specific dimensions of metric behaviour but there are very few such datasets and they either focus on a limited number of phenomena or a limited number of language pairs. We introduce ACES, a contrastive challenge set spanning 146 language pairs, aimed at discovering whether metrics can identify 68 translation accuracy errors. These phenomena range from simple alterations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We conduct a large-scale study by benchmarking ACES on 50 metrics submitted to the WMT 2022 and 2023 metrics shared tasks. We benchmark metric performance, assess their incremental performance over successive campaigns, and measure their sensitivity to a range of linguistic phenomena. We also investigate claims that Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective as MT evaluators by evaluating on ACES. Our results demonstrate that different metric families struggle with different phenomena and that LLM-based methods fail to demonstrate reliable performance. Our analyses indicate that most metrics ignore the source sentence, tend to prefer surface-level overlap and end up incorporating properties of base models which are not always beneficial. We expand ACES to include error span annotations, denoted as SPAN-ACES and we use this dataset to evaluate span-based error metrics showing these metrics also need considerable improvement. Finally, we provide a set of recommendations for building better MT metrics, including focusing on error labels instead of scores, ensembling, designing strategies to explicitly focus on the source sentence, focusing on semantic content and choosing the right base model for representations.

Most current LLM-based models for video understanding can process videos within minutes. However, they struggle with lengthy videos due to challenges such as "noise and redundancy", as well as "memory and computation" constraints. In this paper, we present Goldfish, a methodology tailored for comprehending videos of arbitrary lengths. We also introduce the TVQA-long benchmark, specifically designed to evaluate models' capabilities in understanding long videos with questions in both vision and text content. Goldfish approaches these challenges with an efficient retrieval mechanism that initially gathers the top-k video clips relevant to the instruction before proceeding to provide the desired response. This design of the retrieval mechanism enables the Goldfish to efficiently process arbitrarily long video sequences, facilitating its application in contexts such as movies or television series. To facilitate the retrieval process, we developed MiniGPT4-Video that generates detailed descriptions for the video clips. In addressing the scarcity of benchmarks for long video evaluation, we adapted the TVQA short video benchmark for extended content analysis by aggregating questions from entire episodes, thereby shifting the evaluation from partial to full episode comprehension. We attained a 41.78% accuracy rate on the TVQA-long benchmark, surpassing previous methods by 14.94%. Our MiniGPT4-Video also shows exceptional performance in short video comprehension, exceeding existing state-of-the-art methods by 3.23%, 2.03%, 16.5% and 23.59% on the MSVD, MSRVTT, TGIF, and TVQA short video benchmarks, respectively. These results indicate that our models have significant improvements in both long and short-video understanding. Our models and code have been made publicly available at https://vision-cair.github.io/Goldfish_website/

We present a corpus of 5,000 richly annotated abstracts of medical articles describing clinical randomized controlled trials. Annotations include demarcations of text spans that describe the Patient population enrolled, the Interventions studied and to what they were Compared, and the Outcomes measured (the `PICO' elements). These spans are further annotated at a more granular level, e.g., individual interventions within them are marked and mapped onto a structured medical vocabulary. We acquired annotations from a diverse set of workers with varying levels of expertise and cost. We describe our data collection process and the corpus itself in detail. We then outline a set of challenging NLP tasks that would aid searching of the medical literature and the practice of evidence-based medicine.

Machine reading comprehension tasks require a machine reader to answer questions relevant to the given document. In this paper, we present the first free-form multiple-Choice Chinese machine reading Comprehension dataset (C^3), containing 13,369 documents (dialogues or more formally written mixed-genre texts) and their associated 19,577 multiple-choice free-form questions collected from Chinese-as-a-second-language examinations. We present a comprehensive analysis of the prior knowledge (i.e., linguistic, domain-specific, and general world knowledge) needed for these real-world problems. We implement rule-based and popular neural methods and find that there is still a significant performance gap between the best performing model (68.5%) and human readers (96.0%), especially on problems that require prior knowledge. We further study the effects of distractor plausibility and data augmentation based on translated relevant datasets for English on model performance. We expect C^3 to present great challenges to existing systems as answering 86.8% of questions requires both knowledge within and beyond the accompanying document, and we hope that C^3 can serve as a platform to study how to leverage various kinds of prior knowledge to better understand a given written or orally oriented text. C^3 is available at https://dataset.org/c3/.

Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.

Existing metrics for evaluating the quality of automatically generated questions such as BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, and BLEURT compare the reference and predicted questions, providing a high score when there is a considerable lexical overlap or semantic similarity between the candidate and the reference questions. This approach has two major shortcomings. First, we need expensive human-provided reference questions. Second, it penalises valid questions that may not have high lexical or semantic similarity to the reference questions. In this paper, we propose a new metric, RQUGE, based on the answerability of the candidate question given the context. The metric consists of a question-answering and a span scorer modules, using pre-trained models from existing literature, thus it can be used without any further training. We demonstrate that RQUGE has a higher correlation with human judgment without relying on the reference question. Additionally, RQUGE is shown to be more robust to several adversarial corruptions. Furthermore, we illustrate that we can significantly improve the performance of QA models on out-of-domain datasets by fine-tuning on synthetic data generated by a question generation model and re-ranked by RQUGE.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention for their impressive general-purpose capabilities. For applications requiring intricate domain knowledge, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown a distinct advantage in incorporating domain-specific information into LLMs. However, existing RAG research has not fully addressed the challenges of Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) in telecommunications, particularly in terms of retrieval quality and mitigating hallucinations. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel first token probability guided RAG framework. This framework leverages confidence scores to optimize key hyperparameters, such as chunk number and chunk window size, while dynamically adjusting the context. Our method starts by retrieving the most relevant chunks and generates a single token as the potential answer. The probabilities of all options are then normalized to serve as confidence scores, which guide the dynamic adjustment of the context. By iteratively optimizing the hyperparameters based on these confidence scores, we can continuously improve RAG performance. We conducted experiments to validate the effectiveness of our framework, demonstrating its potential to enhance accuracy in domain-specific MCQA tasks.

This paper proposes to tackle open- domain question answering using Wikipedia as the unique knowledge source: the answer to any factoid question is a text span in a Wikipedia article. This task of machine reading at scale combines the challenges of document retrieval (finding the relevant articles) with that of machine comprehension of text (identifying the answer spans from those articles). Our approach combines a search component based on bigram hashing and TF-IDF matching with a multi-layer recurrent neural network model trained to detect answers in Wikipedia paragraphs. Our experiments on multiple existing QA datasets indicate that (1) both modules are highly competitive with respect to existing counterparts and (2) multitask learning using distant supervision on their combination is an effective complete system on this challenging task.

Hard prompt compression reduces long-context inference cost by independently scoring tokens, sentences, or chunks and retaining the highest-scoring units under a budget. We identify a structural failure in this procedure: independent selection can split dependent evidence pairs, retaining one member while deleting the other. When retained text contains an answer but deleted text defines the entity needed to interpret it, we call the result referential dangling. At a compression ratio of 0.30, Beaver, which ranks coherent chunks using Qwen3-0.6B embeddings, leaves the answer path incomplete in 34-54% of bridge examples across three multi-hop question answering datasets. On a shared HotpotQA bridge set, all six hard compressors we test exhibit dangling at rates up to 60%, and every document in LongBench-v2 Single-Document QA contains at least one dangling reference. On dangling examples evaluated with Qwen3-8B, reinserting the missing supporting paragraph while removing nonsupporting paragraphs to maintain the token budget improves accuracy by 29-34 percentage points (p < 0.0001), recovering at least 88% of the gap to contexts retaining both supporting paragraphs. Stronger answer models do not absorb the loss: on MuSiQue, GPT-5.5 is 8.8 points less accurate on compressed contexts than on contexts retaining both supporting paragraphs. Finally, we train a compact classifier to rank omitted sentences by whether they are needed to interpret retained text and reinsert the top-ranked candidates without support annotations at inference. On HotpotQA with Qwen3-8B, this automatic restoration improves accuracy by 4.7 points while changing the compression ratio only from 0.30 to 0.31. Hard compressors should optimize both relevance and referential completeness.

Transformers have become the gold standard for many natural language processing tasks and, in particular, for multi-hop question answering (MHQA). This task includes processing a long document and reasoning over the multiple parts of it. The landscape of MHQA approaches can be classified into two primary categories. The first group focuses on extracting supporting evidence, thereby constraining the QA model's context to predicted facts. Conversely, the second group relies on the attention mechanism of the long input encoding model to facilitate multi-hop reasoning. However, attention-based token representations lack explicit global contextual information to connect reasoning steps. To address these issues, we propose GEMFormer, a two-stage method that first collects relevant information over the entire document to the memory and then combines it with local context to solve the task. Our experimental results show that fine-tuning a pre-trained model with memory-augmented input, including the most certain global elements, improves the model's performance on three MHQA datasets compared to the baseline. We also found that the global explicit memory contains information from supporting facts required for the correct answer.

Automatic math word problem solving has attracted growing attention in recent years. The evaluation datasets used by previous works have serious limitations in terms of scale and diversity. In this paper, we release a new large-scale and template-rich math word problem dataset named Ape210K. It consists of 210K Chinese elementary school-level math problems, which is 9 times the size of the largest public dataset Math23K. Each problem contains both the gold answer and the equations needed to derive the answer. Ape210K is also of greater diversity with 56K templates, which is 25 times more than Math23K. Our analysis shows that solving Ape210K requires not only natural language understanding but also commonsense knowledge. We expect Ape210K to be a benchmark for math word problem solving systems. Experiments indicate that state-of-the-art models on the Math23K dataset perform poorly on Ape210K. We propose a copy-augmented and feature-enriched sequence to sequence (seq2seq) model, which outperforms existing models by 3.2% on the Math23K dataset and serves as a strong baseline of the Ape210K dataset. The gap is still significant between human and our baseline model, calling for further research efforts. We make Ape210K dataset publicly available at https://github.com/yuantiku/ape210k

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have led to strong performance in open-domain question answering (QA). However, existing models still struggle with questions that admit multiple valid answers. Standard QA benchmarks, which typically assume a single gold answer, overlook this reality and thus produce inappropriate training signals. Existing attempts to handle ambiguity often rely on costly manual annotation, which is difficult to scale to multi-hop datasets such as HotpotQA and MuSiQue. In this paper, we present A^2Search, an annotation-free, end-to-end training framework to recognize and handle ambiguity. At its core is an automated pipeline that detects ambiguous questions and gathers alternative answers via trajectory sampling and evidence verification. The model is then optimized with RL using a carefully designed AnsF1 reward, which naturally accommodates multiple answers. Experiments on eight open-domain QA benchmarks demonstrate that A^2Search achieves new state-of-the-art performance. With only a single rollout, A^2Search-7B yields an average AnsF1@1 score of 48.4% across four multi-hop benchmarks, outperforming all strong baselines, including the substantially larger ReSearch-32B (46.2%). Extensive analyses further show that A^2Search resolves ambiguity and generalizes across benchmarks, highlighting that embracing ambiguity is essential for building more reliable QA systems. Our code, data, and model weights can be found at https://github.com/zfj1998/A2Search

We present our systems submitted for the shared tasks of Acronym Identification (AI) and Acronym Disambiguation (AD) held under Workshop on SDU. We mainly experiment with BERT and SciBERT. In addition, we assess the effectiveness of "BIOless" tagging and blending along with the prowess of ensembling in AI. For AD, we formulate the problem as a span prediction task, experiment with different training techniques and also leverage the use of external data. Our systems rank 11th and 3rd in AI and AD tasks respectively.

We introduce PubMedQA, a novel biomedical question answering (QA) dataset collected from PubMed abstracts. The task of PubMedQA is to answer research questions with yes/no/maybe (e.g.: Do preoperative statins reduce atrial fibrillation after coronary artery bypass grafting?) using the corresponding abstracts. PubMedQA has 1k expert-annotated, 61.2k unlabeled and 211.3k artificially generated QA instances. Each PubMedQA instance is composed of (1) a question which is either an existing research article title or derived from one, (2) a context which is the corresponding abstract without its conclusion, (3) a long answer, which is the conclusion of the abstract and, presumably, answers the research question, and (4) a yes/no/maybe answer which summarizes the conclusion. PubMedQA is the first QA dataset where reasoning over biomedical research texts, especially their quantitative contents, is required to answer the questions. Our best performing model, multi-phase fine-tuning of BioBERT with long answer bag-of-word statistics as additional supervision, achieves 68.1% accuracy, compared to single human performance of 78.0% accuracy and majority-baseline of 55.2% accuracy, leaving much room for improvement. PubMedQA is publicly available at https://pubmedqa.github.io.

This paper introduces MedMCQA, a new large-scale, Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) dataset designed to address real-world medical entrance exam questions. More than 194k high-quality AIIMS \& NEET PG entrance exam MCQs covering 2.4k healthcare topics and 21 medical subjects are collected with an average token length of 12.77 and high topical diversity. Each sample contains a question, correct answer(s), and other options which requires a deeper language understanding as it tests the 10+ reasoning abilities of a model across a wide range of medical subjects \& topics. A detailed explanation of the solution, along with the above information, is provided in this study.

This paper presents our submission to the SemEval 2024 Task 5: The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure. We present two approaches to solving the task of legal answer validation, given an introduction to the case, a question and an answer candidate. Firstly, we fine-tuned pre-trained BERT-based models and found that models trained on domain knowledge perform better. Secondly, we performed few-shot prompting on GPT models and found that reformulating the answer validation task to be a multiple-choice QA task remarkably improves the performance of the model. Our best submission is a BERT-based model that achieved the 7th place out of 20.

Enterprise question answering requires models to acquire proprietary knowledge without discarding general capabilities. We present Wnuan, a three-stage pipeline that constructs task-oriented supervision from documents, performs supervised fine-tuning with general-data replay, and applies reinforcement learning to residual errors. On the 707-question WnuanBench, the primary 32B route raises acceptable-answer rate (AAR) from 52.76% before adaptation to 80.06% after SFT and 91.51% after RL. Under a matched 100-update protocol, residual-error sampling outperforms full-pool and size-matched random sampling by 3.11 and 2.97 points, respectively. Source-cluster bootstrap intervals remain above zero for both contrasts, and a same-domain validation set preserves the ordering. The general-benchmark average decreases by 5.17 points across the route, concentrated in instruction following. The automatic evaluation ensemble agrees with an authoritative domain expert on 90.5% of a stratified Wnuan-Inst response sample. These results characterize both the gains and the general-capability cost of staged enterprise adaptation.

The present study aims to explore the capabilities of Language Models (LMs) in tackling high-stakes multiple-choice tests, represented here by the Exame Nacional do Ensino M\'edio (ENEM), a multidisciplinary entrance examination widely adopted by Brazilian universities. This exam poses challenging tasks for LMs, since its questions may span into multiple fields of knowledge, requiring understanding of information from diverse domains. For instance, a question may require comprehension of both statistics and biology to be solved. This work analyzed responses generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models for questions presented in the 2009-2017 exams, as well as for questions of the 2022 exam, which were made public after the training of the models was completed. Furthermore, different prompt strategies were tested, including the use of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts to generate explanations for answers. On the 2022 edition, the best-performing model, GPT-4 with CoT, achieved an accuracy of 87%, largely surpassing GPT-3.5 by 11 points. The code and data used on experiments are available at https://github.com/piresramon/gpt-4-enem.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become one of the essential tasks in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) as it is often included in several NLU benchmarks (Liang et al., 2020; Wilie et al., 2020). However, most MRC datasets only have answerable question type, overlooking the importance of unanswerable questions. MRC models trained only on answerable questions will select the span that is most likely to be the answer, even when the answer does not actually exist in the given passage (Rajpurkar et al., 2018). This problem especially remains in medium- to low-resource languages like Indonesian. Existing Indonesian MRC datasets (Purwarianti et al., 2007; Clark et al., 2020) are still inadequate because of the small size and limited question types, i.e., they only cover answerable questions. To fill this gap, we build a new Indonesian MRC dataset called I(n)don'tKnow- MRC (IDK-MRC) by combining the automatic and manual unanswerable question generation to minimize the cost of manual dataset construction while maintaining the dataset quality. Combined with the existing answerable questions, IDK-MRC consists of more than 10K questions in total. Our analysis shows that our dataset significantly improves the performance of Indonesian MRC models, showing a large improvement for unanswerable questions.

Pre-trained Generative models such as BART, T5, etc. have gained prominence as a preferred method for text generation in various natural language processing tasks, including abstractive long-form question answering (QA) and summarization. However, the potential of generative models in extractive QA tasks, where discriminative models are commonly employed, remains largely unexplored. Discriminative models often encounter challenges associated with label sparsity, particularly when only a small portion of the context contains the answer. The challenge is more pronounced for multi-span answers. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that uses the power of pre-trained generative models to address extractive QA tasks by generating indexes corresponding to context tokens or sentences that form part of the answer. Through comprehensive evaluations on multiple extractive QA datasets, including MultiSpanQA, BioASQ, MASHQA, and WikiQA, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approach compared to existing state-of-the-art models.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in handling complex queries, much of the past work has depended on extensively annotated datasets by human experts. However, this reliance on fully-supervised annotations poses scalability challenges, particularly as models and data requirements grow. To mitigate this, we explore the potential of enhancing LLMs' reasoning abilities with minimal human supervision. In this work, we introduce self-reinforcement, which begins with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of the model using a small collection of annotated questions. Then it iteratively improves LLMs by learning from the differences in responses from the SFT and unfinetuned models on unlabeled questions. Our approach provides an efficient approach without relying heavily on extensive human-annotated explanations. However, current reasoning benchmarks typically only include golden-reference answers or rationales. Therefore, we present PuzzleBen, a weakly supervised benchmark that comprises 25,147 complex questions, answers, and human-generated rationales across various domains, such as brainteasers, puzzles, riddles, parajumbles, and critical reasoning tasks. A unique aspect of our dataset is the inclusion of 10,000 unannotated questions, enabling us to explore utilizing fewer supersized data to boost LLMs' inference capabilities. Our experiments underscore the significance of PuzzleBen, as well as the effectiveness of our methodology as a promising direction in future endeavors. Our dataset and code will be published soon on Anonymity Link.

Reading comprehension systems for low-resource languages face significant challenges in handling unanswerable questions. These systems tend to produce unreliable responses when correct answers are absent from context. To solve this problem, we introduce NCTB-QA, a large-scale Bangla question answering dataset comprising 87,805 question-answer pairs extracted from 50 textbooks published by Bangladesh's National Curriculum and Textbook Board. Unlike existing Bangla datasets, NCTB-QA maintains a balanced distribution of answerable (57.25%) and unanswerable (42.75%) questions. NCTB-QA also includes adversarially designed instances containing plausible distractors. We benchmark three transformer-based models (BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA) and demonstrate substantial improvements through fine-tuning. BERT achieves 313% relative improvement in F1 score (0.150 to 0.620). Semantic answer quality measured by BERTScore also increases significantly across all models. Our results establish NCTB-QA as a challenging benchmark for Bangla educational question answering. This study demonstrates that domain-specific fine-tuning is critical for robust performance in low-resource settings.

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.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) poses a significant challenge in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While mainstream MRC methods predominantly leverage extractive strategies using encoder-only models such as BERT, generative approaches face the issue of out-of-control generation -- a critical problem where answers generated are often incorrect, irrelevant, or unfaithful to the source text. To address these limitations in generative models for MRC, we introduce the Question-Attended Span Extraction (QASE) module. Integrated during the fine-tuning phase of pre-trained generative language models (PLMs), QASE significantly enhances their performance, allowing them to surpass the extractive capabilities of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4. Notably, these gains in performance do not come with an increase in computational demands. The efficacy of the QASE module has been rigorously tested across various datasets, consistently achieving or even surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) results.

We propose a simple and effective re-ranking method for improving passage retrieval in open question answering. The re-ranker re-scores retrieved passages with a zero-shot question generation model, which uses a pre-trained language model to compute the probability of the input question conditioned on a retrieved passage. This approach can be applied on top of any retrieval method (e.g. neural or keyword-based), does not require any domain- or task-specific training (and therefore is expected to generalize better to data distribution shifts), and provides rich cross-attention between query and passage (i.e. it must explain every token in the question). When evaluated on a number of open-domain retrieval datasets, our re-ranker improves strong unsupervised retrieval models by 6%-18% absolute and strong supervised models by up to 12% in terms of top-20 passage retrieval accuracy. We also obtain new state-of-the-art results on full open-domain question answering by simply adding the new re-ranker to existing models with no further changes.

Enterprise question answering is framed as retrieving internal documents and generating grounded answers. Routine enterprise records, however, are work by-products in which required organizational relations remain implicit across heterogeneous sources. Existing benchmarks provide realistic multi-source evidence, but often materialize a predefined answer path and therefore test the composition of stated facts rather than recovery of a target relation absent from the corpus. We call the latter capability latent organizational reasoning. We introduce ENTLORE, a graph-grounded benchmark construction framework that reconstructs an audited enterprise world from routine documents, authoritative organizational tables, and operational records. Versioned organizational conventions certify derived relations in a truth graph, enabling complete golden answers and proof certificates. The aligned anonymized release exposes only the document corpus while withholding private structure and target relations. ENTLORE contains 2,341 documents from three source types and 907 questions spanning explicit lookup, cross-source composition, and latent organizational reasoning, evaluated across 56 model and access configurations. Structuring the released world as an induced entity graph or navigable knowledge base gives the strongest deployable results. Yet supplying gold documents still leaves 30.4% of latent questions unanswered, versus 12.6% and 6.2% for explicit and compositional questions. Enterprise QA therefore depends not only on document recall, but also on whether implicit organizational relations become usable. The benchmark, data, and code are publicly available at ENTLORE.

We present AlphaGeometry2, a significantly improved version of AlphaGeometry introduced in Trinh et al. (2024), which has now surpassed an average gold medalist in solving Olympiad geometry problems. To achieve this, we first extend the original AlphaGeometry language to tackle harder problems involving movements of objects, and problems containing linear equations of angles, ratios, and distances. This, together with other additions, has markedly improved the coverage rate of the AlphaGeometry language on International Math Olympiads (IMO) 2000-2024 geometry problems from 66% to 88%. The search process of AlphaGeometry2 has also been greatly improved through the use of Gemini architecture for better language modeling, and a novel knowledge-sharing mechanism that combines multiple search trees. Together with further enhancements to the symbolic engine and synthetic data generation, we have significantly boosted the overall solving rate of AlphaGeometry2 to 84% for all geometry problems over the last 25 years, compared to 54% previously. AlphaGeometry2 was also part of the system that achieved silver-medal standard at IMO 2024 https://dpmd.ai/imo-silver. Last but not least, we report progress towards using AlphaGeometry2 as a part of a fully automated system that reliably solves geometry problems directly from natural language input.

Fine-tuned language models use greedy decoding to answer reading comprehension questions with relative success. However, this approach does not ensure that the answer is a span in the given passage, nor does it guarantee that it is the most probable one. Does greedy decoding actually perform worse than an algorithm that does adhere to these properties? To study the performance and optimality of greedy decoding, we present exact-extract, a decoding algorithm that efficiently finds the most probable answer span in the context. We compare the performance of T5 with both decoding algorithms on zero-shot and few-shot extractive question answering. When no training examples are available, exact-extract significantly outperforms greedy decoding. However, greedy decoding quickly converges towards the performance of exact-extract with the introduction of a few training examples, becoming more extractive and increasingly likelier to generate the most probable span as the training set grows. We also show that self-supervised training can bias the model towards extractive behavior, increasing performance in the zero-shot setting without resorting to annotated examples. Overall, our results suggest that pretrained language models are so good at adapting to extractive question answering, that it is often enough to fine-tune on a small training set for the greedy algorithm to emulate the optimal decoding strategy.

This paper presents the RMIT--ADM+S participation in the SIGIR 2025 LiveRAG Challenge. Our Generation-Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GRAG) approach relies on generating a hypothetical answer that is used in the retrieval phase, alongside the original question. GRAG also incorporates a pointwise large language model (LLM)-based re-ranking step prior to final answer generation. We describe the system architecture and the rationale behind our design choices. In particular, a systematic evaluation using the Grid of Points (GoP) framework and N-way ANOVA enabled comparison across multiple configurations, including query variant generation, question decomposition, rank fusion strategies, and prompting techniques for answer generation. Our system achieved a Relevance score of 1.199 and a Faithfulness score of 0.477 on the private leaderboard, placing among the top four finalists in the LiveRAG 2025 Challenge.

Eleven Large Language Models (LLMs) were assessed using a custom-made battery of false-belief tasks, considered a gold standard in testing Theory of Mind (ToM) in humans. The battery included 640 prompts spread across 40 diverse tasks, each one including a false-belief scenario, three closely matched true-belief control scenarios, and the reversed versions of all four. To solve a single task, a model needed to correctly answer 16 prompts across all eight scenarios. Smaller and older models solved no tasks; GPT-3-davinci-003 (from November 2022) and ChatGPT-3.5-turbo (from March 2023) solved 20% of the tasks; ChatGPT-4 (from June 2023) solved 75% of the tasks, matching the performance of six-year-old children observed in past studies. We explore the potential interpretation of these findings, including the intriguing possibility that ToM, previously considered exclusive to humans, may have spontaneously emerged as a byproduct of LLMs' improving language skills.

Safety alignment in open-weight language models is trivially removable: abliteration projects a refusal-mediating direction out of the weights in minutes, and no release-time defense we are aware of prevents it durably. What cannot be prevented can be deceived. Our defense, decoy hardening ("Fool's Gold"), concedes the refusal strip and poisons its payoff: once refusal is stripped, most answers to hazardous operational requests are confident, fluent decoys whose critical elements are falsified. Decoys are trained inside a differentiable simulation of the attack, expressing only in the attacked state; a refusal pin and benign leash hold clean-state behavior to the original. We instantiate it on seven models from five families (9B-122B, dense and mixture-of-experts). On the six models passing our pre-registered efficacy gate, 0.51-0.90 of attacked-state responses to held-out prompts are decoys, +0.27-0.84 attributable to the defense; all six stay within registered benign-behavior and capability budgets; the seventh (smaller) fails the gate (boundary case). Rates replicate on a frozen test split or untouched strata. The claim is epistemic: without independent ground truth, no observation surface we tested separates falsified answers from correct ones - on external red-team benchmarks' CBRNE-adjacent slice, the defended 122B is fatally wrong on 0.82-0.86 of matched-quality answers vs at most 0.10 undefended. Repeated sampling does not restore trust: element-wise consensus at K=64 reconstructs a fully usable procedure on 0.083-0.625 of prompts where the instrument validates, vs 0.58-0.96 undefended, with no label-free way to tell the regimes apart; on the weakest such model the claim is per-draw only. We evaluate chemical and biological hazards; the defense does not address in-context jailbreaks and protects only the initially released defended weights.

The common practice in coreference resolution is to identify and evaluate the maximum span of mentions. The use of maximum spans tangles coreference evaluation with the challenges of mention boundary detection like prepositional phrase attachment. To address this problem, minimum spans are manually annotated in smaller corpora. However, this additional annotation is costly and therefore, this solution does not scale to large corpora. In this paper, we propose the MINA algorithm for automatically extracting minimum spans to benefit from minimum span evaluation in all corpora. We show that the extracted minimum spans by MINA are consistent with those that are manually annotated by experts. Our experiments show that using minimum spans is in particular important in cross-dataset coreference evaluation, in which detected mention boundaries are noisier due to domain shift. We will integrate MINA into https://github.com/ns-moosavi/coval for reporting standard coreference scores based on both maximum and automatically detected minimum spans.

Scenario-based question answering (SQA) has attracted increasing research attention. It typically requires retrieving and integrating knowledge from multiple sources, and applying general knowledge to a specific case described by a scenario. SQA widely exists in the medical, geography, and legal domains---both in practice and in the exams. In this paper, we introduce the GeoSQA dataset. It consists of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in the geography domain at high school level, where diagrams (e.g., maps, charts) have been manually annotated with natural language descriptions to benefit NLP research. Benchmark results on a variety of state-of-the-art methods for question answering, textual entailment, and reading comprehension demonstrate the unique challenges presented by SQA for future research.

The abilities of long-context language models (LMs) are often evaluated using the "Needle-in-a-Haystack" (NIAH) test, which comprises tasks designed to assess a model's ability to identify specific information ("needle") within large text sequences ("haystack"). While these benchmarks measure how well models understand long-context input sequences, they do not effectively gauge the quality of long-form text generation--a critical aspect for applications such as design proposals and creative writing. To address this gap, we have introduced a new long-form text evaluation benchmark, Spinning the Golden Thread (SGT), which tests models' ability to identify specific events within generated long text sequences. In this benchmark, we prompt long-context LMs to create long-form text that must include particular events or constraints and evaluate their ability to incorporate these elements. We evaluated ten long-context LMs across four distinct scenarios, three types of prompt instructions, and two different generation-length settings (16K and 32K). Although these models perform well on NIAH benchmarks, none demonstrated satisfactory performance on the Spinning the Golden Thread, raising concerns about their ability to generate coherent long-form text that follows instructions. Additionally, as the length of the generated text increases, all models exhibit a significant drop in performance.

Pretraining Large Language Models (LLMs) on large corpora of textual data is now a standard paradigm. When using these LLMs for many downstream applications, it is common to additionally bake in new knowledge (e.g., time-critical news, or private domain knowledge) into the pretrained model either through RAG-based-prompting, or fine-tuning. However, the optimal methodology for the model to gain such new knowledge remains an open question. In this paper, we present Retrieval Augmented FineTuning (RAFT), a training recipe that improves the model's ability to answer questions in a "open-book" in-domain settings. In RAFT, given a question, and a set of retrieved documents, we train the model to ignore those documents that don't help in answering the question, which we call, distractor documents. RAFT accomplishes this by citing verbatim the right sequence from the relevant document that would help answer the question. This coupled with RAFT's chain-of-thought-style response helps improve the model's ability to reason. In domain-specific RAG, RAFT consistently improves the model's performance across PubMed, HotpotQA, and Gorilla datasets, presenting a post-training recipe to improve pre-trained LLMs to in-domain RAG. RAFT's code and demo are open-sourced at github.com/ShishirPatil/gorilla.

We introduce a new task, named video corpus visual answer localization (VCVAL), which aims to locate the visual answer in a large collection of untrimmed instructional videos using a natural language question. This task requires a range of skills - the interaction between vision and language, video retrieval, passage comprehension, and visual answer localization. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal contrastive global-span (CCGS) method for the VCVAL, jointly training the video corpus retrieval and visual answer localization subtasks with the global-span matrix. We have reconstructed a dataset named MedVidCQA, on which the VCVAL task is benchmarked. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other competitive methods both in the video corpus retrieval and visual answer localization subtasks. Most importantly, we perform detailed analyses on extensive experiments, paving a new path for understanding the instructional videos, which ushers in further research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in solving mathematical reasoning tasks, leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data as a vital component in guiding answer generation. Current paradigms typically generate CoT and answers directly for a given problem, diverging from human problem-solving strategies to some extent. Humans often solve problems by recalling analogous cases and leveraging their solutions to reason about the current task. Inspired by this cognitive process, we propose MetaLadder, a novel framework that explicitly prompts LLMs to recall and reflect on meta-problems, those structurally or semantically analogous problems, alongside their CoT solutions before addressing the target problem. Additionally, we introduce a problem-restating mechanism to enhance the model's comprehension of the target problem by regenerating the original question, which further improves reasoning accuracy. Therefore, the model can achieve reasoning transfer from analogical problems, mimicking human-like "learning from examples" and generalization abilities. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our MetaLadder significantly boosts LLMs' problem-solving accuracy, largely outperforming standard CoT-based methods (10.3\% accuracy gain) and other methods. Our code and data has been released at https://github.com/LHL3341/MetaLadder.

In community-based question answering (CQA) platforms, automatic answer ranking for a given question is critical for finding potentially popular answers in early times. The mainstream approaches learn to generate answer ranking scores based on the matching degree between question and answer representations as well as the influence of respondents. However, they encounter two main limitations: (1) Correlations between answers in the same question are often overlooked. (2) Question and respondent representations are built independently of specific answers before affecting answer representations. To address the limitations, we devise a novel graph-based tri-attention network, namely GTAN, which has two innovations. First, GTAN proposes to construct a graph for each question and learn answer correlations from each graph through graph neural networks (GNNs). Second, based on the representations learned from GNNs, an alternating tri-attention method is developed to alternatively build target-aware respondent representations, answer-specific question representations, and context-aware answer representations by attention computation. GTAN finally integrates the above representations to generate answer ranking scores. Experiments on three real-world CQA datasets demonstrate GTAN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art answer ranking methods, validating the rationality of the network architecture.

Medical texts are notoriously challenging to read. Properly measuring their readability is the first step towards making them more accessible. In this paper, we present a systematic study on fine-grained readability measurements in the medical domain at both sentence-level and span-level. We introduce a new dataset MedReadMe, which consists of manually annotated readability ratings and fine-grained complex span annotation for 4,520 sentences, featuring two novel "Google-Easy" and "Google-Hard" categories. It supports our quantitative analysis, which covers 650 linguistic features and automatic complex word and jargon identification. Enabled by our high-quality annotation, we benchmark and improve several state-of-the-art sentence-level readability metrics for the medical domain specifically, which include unsupervised, supervised, and prompting-based methods using recently developed large language models (LLMs). Informed by our fine-grained complex span annotation, we find that adding a single feature, capturing the number of jargon spans, into existing readability formulas can significantly improve their correlation with human judgments. The data is available at tinyurl.com/medreadme-repo

Deep-research agents solve tasks through long trajectories of search, tool use, evidence inspection, and answer synthesis. Evaluation based on final answers shows whether an agent succeeds, but not which parts of the trajectory make the answer unreliable. We study span-level error localization for deep-research agents. We collect 2,790 real trajectories from two agent frameworks, three backbone models, and three benchmarks, convert raw logs into semantic spans, and annotate harmful error spans through LLM-assisted expert review. From these annotations, we build TELBench, a 1,000-instance benchmark for identifying error spans among normal exploration, failed searches, tentative hypotheses, and harmless noise. We further propose DRIFT, a claim-centric auditing framework that tracks agent claims, checks their support in trajectory evidence, and marks spans where unsupported or conflicting claims affect the answer path. Experiments across model families and auditing frameworks show that DRIFT improves span-level error localization and first-error accuracy by up to 30 percentage points. Our work provides a process-level view of reliability in deep-research agents.

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.

Most works on modeling the conversation history in Conversational Question Answering (CQA) report a single main result on a common CQA benchmark. While existing models show impressive results on CQA leaderboards, it remains unclear whether they are robust to shifts in setting (sometimes to more realistic ones), training data size (e.g. from large to small sets) and domain. In this work, we design and conduct the first large-scale robustness study of history modeling approaches for CQA. We find that high benchmark scores do not necessarily translate to strong robustness, and that various methods can perform extremely differently under different settings. Equipped with the insights from our study, we design a novel prompt-based history modeling approach, and demonstrate its strong robustness across various settings. Our approach is inspired by existing methods that highlight historic answers in the passage. However, instead of highlighting by modifying the passage token embeddings, we add textual prompts directly in the passage text. Our approach is simple, easy-to-plug into practically any model, and highly effective, thus we recommend it as a starting point for future model developers. We also hope that our study and insights will raise awareness to the importance of robustness-focused evaluation, in addition to obtaining high leaderboard scores, leading to better CQA systems.

We develop an algorithm which exceeds the performance of board certified cardiologists in detecting a wide range of heart arrhythmias from electrocardiograms recorded with a single-lead wearable monitor. We build a dataset with more than 500 times the number of unique patients than previously studied corpora. On this dataset, we train a 34-layer convolutional neural network which maps a sequence of ECG samples to a sequence of rhythm classes. Committees of board-certified cardiologists annotate a gold standard test set on which we compare the performance of our model to that of 6 other individual cardiologists. We exceed the average cardiologist performance in both recall (sensitivity) and precision (positive predictive value).

Question answering (QA) models often rely on large-scale training datasets, which necessitates the development of a data generation framework to reduce the cost of manual annotations. Although several recent studies have aimed to generate synthetic questions with single-span answers, no study has been conducted on the creation of list questions with multiple, non-contiguous spans as answers. To address this gap, we propose LIQUID, an automated framework for generating list QA datasets from unlabeled corpora. We first convert a passage from Wikipedia or PubMed into a summary and extract named entities from the summarized text as candidate answers. This allows us to select answers that are semantically correlated in context and is, therefore, suitable for constructing list questions. We then create questions using an off-the-shelf question generator with the extracted entities and original passage. Finally, iterative filtering and answer expansion are performed to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the answers. Using our synthetic data, we significantly improve the performance of the previous best list QA models by exact-match F1 scores of 5.0 on MultiSpanQA, 1.9 on Quoref, and 2.8 averaged across three BioASQ benchmarks.

We provide here a dataset for tasks related to natural language understanding and natural language inference. The dataset contains logical puzzles in natural language from three domains: comparing puzzles, knighs and knaves, and zebra puzzles. Each puzzle is associated with the entire set of atomic questions that can be generated based on the relations and individuals occurring in the text. For each question we provide the correct answer: entailment, contradiction or ambiguity. The answer's correctness is verified against theorem provers. Good puzzles have two properties: (i) each piece of information is necessary and (ii) no unnecessary information is provided. These properties make puzzles interesting candidates for machine comprehension tasks.

We present a new large-scale corpus of Question-Answer driven Semantic Role Labeling (QA-SRL) annotations, and the first high-quality QA-SRL parser. Our corpus, QA-SRL Bank 2.0, consists of over 250,000 question-answer pairs for over 64,000 sentences across 3 domains and was gathered with a new crowd-sourcing scheme that we show has high precision and good recall at modest cost. We also present neural models for two QA-SRL subtasks: detecting argument spans for a predicate and generating questions to label the semantic relationship. The best models achieve question accuracy of 82.6% and span-level accuracy of 77.6% (under human evaluation) on the full pipelined QA-SRL prediction task. They can also, as we show, be used to gather additional annotations at low cost.

We present the Chinese Elementary School Math Word Problems (CMATH) dataset, comprising 1.7k elementary school-level math word problems with detailed annotations, source from actual Chinese workbooks and exams. This dataset aims to provide a benchmark tool for assessing the following question: to what grade level of elementary school math do the abilities of popular large language models (LLMs) correspond? We evaluate a variety of popular LLMs, including both commercial and open-source options, and discover that only GPT-4 achieves success (accuracy geq 60\%) across all six elementary school grades, while other models falter at different grade levels. Furthermore, we assess the robustness of several top-performing LLMs by augmenting the original problems in the CMATH dataset with distracting information. Our findings reveal that GPT-4 is able to maintains robustness, while other model fail. We anticipate that our study will expose limitations in LLMs' arithmetic and reasoning capabilities, and promote their ongoing development and advancement.

Regulatory documents, issued by governmental regulatory bodies, establish rules, guidelines, and standards that organizations must adhere to for legal compliance. These documents, characterized by their length, complexity and frequent updates, are challenging to interpret, requiring significant allocation of time and expertise on the part of organizations to ensure ongoing compliance.Regulatory Natural Language Processing (RegNLP) is a multidisciplinary subfield aimed at simplifying access to and interpretation of regulatory rules and obligations. We define an Automated Question-Passage Generation task for RegNLP, create the ObliQA dataset containing 27,869 questions derived from the Abu Dhabi Global Markets (ADGM) financial regulation document collection, design a baseline Regulatory Information Retrieval and Answer Generation system, and evaluate it with RePASs, a novel evaluation metric that tests whether generated answers accurately capture all relevant obligations and avoid contradictions.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based on Large Language Models (LLMs) is a powerful solution to understand and query the industry's closed-source documents. However, basic RAG often struggles with complex QA tasks in legal and regulatory domains, particularly when dealing with numerous government documents. The top-k strategy frequently misses golden chunks, leading to incomplete or inaccurate answers. To address these retrieval bottlenecks, we explore two strategies to improve evidence coverage and answer quality. The first is a One-SHOT retrieval method that adaptively selects chunks based on a token budget, allowing as much relevant content as possible to be included within the model's context window. Additionally, we design modules to further filter and refine the chunks. The second is an iterative retrieval strategy built on a Reasoning Agentic RAG framework, where a reasoning LLM dynamically issues search queries, evaluates retrieved results, and progressively refines the context over multiple turns. We identify query drift and retrieval laziness issues and further design two modules to tackle them. Through extensive experiments on a dataset of government documents, we aim to offer practical insights and guidance for real-world applications in legal and regulatory domains.

This paper introduces a new suite of question answering datasets for Norwegian; NorOpenBookQA, NorCommonSenseQA, NorTruthfulQA, and NRK-Quiz-QA. The data covers a wide range of skills and knowledge domains, including world knowledge, commonsense reasoning, truthfulness, and knowledge about Norway. Covering both of the written standards of Norwegian - Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk - our datasets comprise over 10k question-answer pairs, created by native speakers. We detail our dataset creation approach and present the results of evaluating 11 language models (LMs) in zero- and few-shot regimes. Most LMs perform better in Bokm{\aa}l than Nynorsk, struggle most with commonsense reasoning, and are often untruthful in generating answers to questions. All our datasets and annotation materials are publicly available.

Drug-information question answering is a high-stakes setting where hallucinated facts can mislead clinical decision-making and the provenance of each cited fact matters as much as the fact itself. We present DrugClaw, a multi-agent retrieval-augmented system that queries a registry of drug and pharmacovigilance skills via a reflection-driven state-machine workflow and returns answers grounded in primary regulatory or peer-reviewed records. We also contribute DrugAudit, a 3,772-item authority-aware benchmark with an evaluation panel that scores upstream-of-gold source match, token-level semantic snippet overlap, and citation faithfulness under a dual-judge LLM-as-judge protocol with inter-judge kappa = 0.88 (almost-perfect). Across DrugAudit plus drug-related subsets of MedQA (751) and PubMedQA (512), DrugClaw is top-1 on every column of the headline table: composite Evidence Index under both judges, judge-mediated answer correctness, primary-source rate (0.918, +10.1 pp over next-best), faithfulness (0.887, +5.9 pp), MedQA (0.920), and PubMedQA (0.693).

We present TriviaQA, a challenging reading comprehension dataset containing over 650K question-answer-evidence triples. TriviaQA includes 95K question-answer pairs authored by trivia enthusiasts and independently gathered evidence documents, six per question on average, that provide high quality distant supervision for answering the questions. We show that, in comparison to other recently introduced large-scale datasets, TriviaQA (1) has relatively complex, compositional questions, (2) has considerable syntactic and lexical variability between questions and corresponding answer-evidence sentences, and (3) requires more cross sentence reasoning to find answers. We also present two baseline algorithms: a feature-based classifier and a state-of-the-art neural network, that performs well on SQuAD reading comprehension. Neither approach comes close to human performance (23% and 40% vs. 80%), suggesting that TriviaQA is a challenging testbed that is worth significant future study. Data and code available at -- http://nlp.cs.washington.edu/triviaqa/

We fine-tune GPT-3 to answer long-form questions using a text-based web-browsing environment, which allows the model to search and navigate the web. By setting up the task so that it can be performed by humans, we are able to train models on the task using imitation learning, and then optimize answer quality with human feedback. To make human evaluation of factual accuracy easier, models must collect references while browsing in support of their answers. We train and evaluate our models on ELI5, a dataset of questions asked by Reddit users. Our best model is obtained by fine-tuning GPT-3 using behavior cloning, and then performing rejection sampling against a reward model trained to predict human preferences. This model's answers are preferred by humans 56% of the time to those of our human demonstrators, and 69% of the time to the highest-voted answer from Reddit.

We present two new large-scale datasets aimed at evaluating systems designed to comprehend a natural language query and extract its answer from a large corpus of text. The Quasar-S dataset consists of 37000 cloze-style (fill-in-the-gap) queries constructed from definitions of software entity tags on the popular website Stack Overflow. The posts and comments on the website serve as the background corpus for answering the cloze questions. The Quasar-T dataset consists of 43000 open-domain trivia questions and their answers obtained from various internet sources. ClueWeb09 serves as the background corpus for extracting these answers. We pose these datasets as a challenge for two related subtasks of factoid Question Answering: (1) searching for relevant pieces of text that include the correct answer to a query, and (2) reading the retrieved text to answer the query. We also describe a retrieval system for extracting relevant sentences and documents from the corpus given a query, and include these in the release for researchers wishing to only focus on (2). We evaluate several baselines on both datasets, ranging from simple heuristics to powerful neural models, and show that these lag behind human performance by 16.4% and 32.1% for Quasar-S and -T respectively. The datasets are available at https://github.com/bdhingra/quasar .

Long video question answering (Long-Video QA) increasingly relies on agentic tool use to retrieve evidence from long videos. In realistic settings, this process often requires multi-hop retrieval, where agents must iteratively gather multiple discontinuous evidence clips. However, existing long-video benchmarks are largely static: they rarely enforce strict multi-hop retrieval and typically lack a standardized evidence-access interface, making it difficult to separate failures in retrieval planning from those in answer generation. To address this gap, we introduce LongVidSearch, a benchmark for evaluating agentic multi-hop evidence retrieval planning in long videos under standardized access constraints. LongVidSearch enforces retrieval necessity: a Hop-k question requires exactly k necessary evidence clips, and removing any single clip renders the question unsolvable. The benchmark contains 3,000 questions over 447 long videos (average length 26 minutes), covering four reasoning categories: State Mutation, Causal Inference, Global Summary, and Visual Tracking, with 2-hop, 3-hop, and 4-hop evidence requirements. To ensure fair and controlled evaluation, all agents interact with LongVidSearch through a unified tool interface, which fixes the retrieval backend and isolates the agent's ability to formulate queries and plan iterative retrieval. In addition to answer accuracy, we measure tool-call cost to analyze the accuracy-efficiency trade-off under identical access conditions. We evaluate VideoAgent-style QA agents with multiple backbone LLMs using three-judge majority voting. GPT-5 achieves the highest accuracy (42.43), outperforming Gemini 3 Pro (30.97) and GPT-4o (19.20), yet remaining below 50 %, highlighting the difficulty of multi-hop retrieval planning. With gold evidence clips, performance becomes near-perfect, confirming retrieval planning as the primary bottleneck.

Web-agent benchmarks overwhelmingly measure depth -- pinning one obscure answer behind a chain of constraints -- while breadth, exhaustively enumerating a closed set and filling each item's attributes, is barely evaluated, especially outside English. Breadth is also hard to build: certifying that a gold set is complete and every cell correct is far costlier than checking a single answer. I introduce Ko-WideSearch, a Korean breadth-search benchmark built by an automated synthesize-and-verify pipeline. Each task names a set-parent entity -- a TV season, a dynasty, a league, an administrative region, an election -- and asks for its full membership plus a per-item attribute table, graded by Item-, Column-, and Row-F1. It spans 228 tables over 190 entities and sixteen categories across three difficulty tiers, set by two structural knobs I dial independently -- table width and a 2-D composite key -- so cross-product membership climbs from 0\% to 100\% across the tiers. A single normalization-aware comparator is shared between gold construction and grading, so stable date and count columns are not over-dropped on formatting alone. Across twenty web agents, the failure is consistent: agents recover the set but not the rows (e.g.\ Item-F1 92.8 against Row-F1 53.7), accuracy falls steadily as the knobs harden, and neither more search nor more spend closes the gap. Broken down by cell, the hard part is finding the right value, not formatting it: open-ended free-text cells fail most, while cells with a standard answer such as a date or a name usually come out right.

We present a new task and dataset, ScreenQA, for screen content understanding via question answering. The existing screen datasets are focused either on structure and component-level understanding, or on a much higher-level composite task such as navigation and task completion. We attempt to bridge the gap between these two by annotating 86K question-answer pairs over the RICO dataset in hope to benchmark the screen reading comprehension capacity.

This paper introduces Golden-Retriever, designed to efficiently navigate vast industrial knowledge bases, overcoming challenges in traditional LLM fine-tuning and RAG frameworks with domain-specific jargon and context interpretation. Golden-Retriever incorporates a reflection-based question augmentation step before document retrieval, which involves identifying jargon, clarifying its meaning based on context, and augmenting the question accordingly. Specifically, our method extracts and lists all jargon and abbreviations in the input question, determines the context against a pre-defined list, and queries a jargon dictionary for extended definitions and descriptions. This comprehensive augmentation ensures the RAG framework retrieves the most relevant documents by providing clear context and resolving ambiguities, significantly improving retrieval accuracy. Evaluations using three open-source LLMs on a domain-specific question-answer dataset demonstrate Golden-Retriever's superior performance, providing a robust solution for efficiently integrating and querying industrial knowledge bases.

Evolving documents, such as laws, tax codes, and software documentation, are amended, replaced, and sometimes reverted over time, so a question has different correct answers at different dates. In contrast to encyclopedic knowledge, where an old fact is simply overwritten, an amendment is itself an official text that states what it replaces and when it takes effect, and the earlier version stays correct for its validity period. The central challenge is therefore version resolution, that is, identifying the version in force on the queried date. Existing temporal QA datasets treat time only as an annotation, so version resolution stays untested. We present TIDE, an expert-verified benchmark of 3,050 QA pairs over 644 official customs instruments issued between 1969 and 2025 by the Government of Bangladesh, covering eight task types over deeply code-mixed documents that are heterogeneous in layout and dated in two calendars. In addition, we evaluate nine recent LLMs under a single protocol across parametric, gold-context, and retrieval access, scored by a three-judge LLM council with a hard date gate separating correct meaning from correct time. The best macro-averaged accuracy is only 68.5%. Resolving a version from an implicit date reaches 59.7%, and detecting that the supplied version does not govern the query reaches only 26.7%. Models are more likely to find correct versions than to reject incorrect ones, and they tend to follow a confident parametric answer over the supplied authoritative text. All code and data are available at https://github.com/icsetepa44/TIDE

We present SpaceQA, to the best of our knowledge the first open-domain QA system in Space mission design. SpaceQA is part of an initiative by the European Space Agency (ESA) to facilitate the access, sharing and reuse of information about Space mission design within the agency and with the public. We adopt a state-of-the-art architecture consisting of a dense retriever and a neural reader and opt for an approach based on transfer learning rather than fine-tuning due to the lack of domain-specific annotated data. Our evaluation on a test set produced by ESA is largely consistent with the results originally reported by the evaluated retrievers and confirms the need of fine tuning for reading comprehension. As of writing this paper, ESA is piloting SpaceQA internally.

We present Twin Answer Sentences Attack (TASA), an adversarial attack method for question answering (QA) models that produces fluent and grammatical adversarial contexts while maintaining gold answers. Despite phenomenal progress on general adversarial attacks, few works have investigated the vulnerability and attack specifically for QA models. In this work, we first explore the biases in the existing models and discover that they mainly rely on keyword matching between the question and context, and ignore the relevant contextual relations for answer prediction. Based on two biases above, TASA attacks the target model in two folds: (1) lowering the model's confidence on the gold answer with a perturbed answer sentence; (2) misguiding the model towards a wrong answer with a distracting answer sentence. Equipped with designed beam search and filtering methods, TASA can generate more effective attacks than existing textual attack methods while sustaining the quality of contexts, in extensive experiments on five QA datasets and human evaluations.

Evaluating whether multimodal large language models truly understand long-form scientific papers remains challenging: answer-only metrics and synthetic "Needle-In-A-Haystack" tests often reward answer matching without requiring a causal, evidence-linked reasoning trace in the document. We propose the "Fish-in-the-Ocean" (FITO) paradigm, which requires models to construct explicit cross-modal evidence chains within native scientific documents. To operationalize FITO, we build SIN-Data, a scientific interleaved corpus that preserves the native interleaving of text and figures. On top of it, we construct SIN-Bench with four progressive tasks covering evidence discovery (SIN-Find), hypothesis verification (SIN-Verify), grounded QA (SIN-QA), and evidence-anchored synthesis (SIN-Summary). We further introduce "No Evidence, No Score", scoring predictions when grounded to verifiable anchors and diagnosing evidence quality via matching, relevance, and logic. Experiments on eight MLLMs show that grounding is the primary bottleneck: Gemini-3-pro achieves the best average overall score (0.573), while GPT-5 attains the highest SIN-QA answer accuracy (0.767) but underperforms on evidence-aligned overall scores, exposing a gap between correctness and traceable support.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) models often perform poorly on out-of-distribution data and struggle on domain generalization. Due to the multi-modal nature of this task, multiple factors of variation are intertwined, making generalization difficult to analyze. This motivates us to introduce a virtual benchmark, Super-CLEVR, where different factors in VQA domain shifts can be isolated in order that their effects can be studied independently. Four factors are considered: visual complexity, question redundancy, concept distribution and concept compositionality. With controllably generated data, Super-CLEVR enables us to test VQA methods in situations where the test data differs from the training data along each of these axes. We study four existing methods, including two neural symbolic methods NSCL and NSVQA, and two non-symbolic methods FiLM and mDETR; and our proposed method, probabilistic NSVQA (P-NSVQA), which extends NSVQA with uncertainty reasoning. P-NSVQA outperforms other methods on three of the four domain shift factors. Our results suggest that disentangling reasoning and perception, combined with probabilistic uncertainty, form a strong VQA model that is more robust to domain shifts. The dataset and code are released at https://github.com/Lizw14/Super-CLEVR.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) represent human-crafted factual knowledge in the form of triplets (head, relation, tail), which collectively form a graph. Question Answering over KGs (KGQA) is the task of answering natural questions grounding the reasoning to the information provided by the KG. Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models for QA tasks due to their remarkable ability to understand natural language. On the other hand, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely used for KGQA as they can handle the complex graph information stored in the KG. In this work, we introduce GNN-RAG, a novel method for combining language understanding abilities of LLMs with the reasoning abilities of GNNs in a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) style. First, a GNN reasons over a dense KG subgraph to retrieve answer candidates for a given question. Second, the shortest paths in the KG that connect question entities and answer candidates are extracted to represent KG reasoning paths. The extracted paths are verbalized and given as input for LLM reasoning with RAG. In our GNN-RAG framework, the GNN acts as a dense subgraph reasoner to extract useful graph information, while the LLM leverages its natural language processing ability for ultimate KGQA. Furthermore, we develop a retrieval augmentation (RA) technique to further boost KGQA performance with GNN-RAG. Experimental results show that GNN-RAG achieves state-of-the-art performance in two widely used KGQA benchmarks (WebQSP and CWQ), outperforming or matching GPT-4 performance with a 7B tuned LLM. In addition, GNN-RAG excels on multi-hop and multi-entity questions outperforming competing approaches by 8.9--15.5% points at answer F1.

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 present the ARC-DA dataset, a direct-answer ("open response", "freeform") version of the ARC (AI2 Reasoning Challenge) multiple-choice dataset. While ARC has been influential in the community, its multiple-choice format is unrepresentative of real-world questions, and multiple choice formats can be particularly susceptible to artifacts. The ARC-DA dataset addresses these concerns by converting questions to direct-answer format using a combination of crowdsourcing and expert review. The resulting dataset contains 2985 questions with a total of 8436 valid answers (questions typically have more than one valid answer). ARC-DA is one of the first DA datasets of natural questions that often require reasoning, and where appropriate question decompositions are not evident from the questions themselves. We describe the conversion approach taken, appropriate evaluation metrics, and several strong models. Although high, the best scores (81% GENIE, 61.4% F1, 63.2% ROUGE-L) still leave considerable room for improvement. In addition, the dataset provides a natural setting for new research on explanation, as many questions require reasoning to construct answers. We hope the dataset spurs further advances in complex question-answering by the community. ARC-DA is available at https://allenai.org/data/arc-da

Skill Extraction (SE) is an important and widely-studied task useful to gain insights into labor market dynamics. However, there is a lacuna of datasets and annotation guidelines; available datasets are few and contain crowd-sourced labels on the span-level or labels from a predefined skill inventory. To address this gap, we introduce SKILLSPAN, a novel SE dataset consisting of 14.5K sentences and over 12.5K annotated spans. We release its respective guidelines created over three different sources annotated for hard and soft skills by domain experts. We introduce a BERT baseline (Devlin et al., 2019). To improve upon this baseline, we experiment with language models that are optimized for long spans (Joshi et al., 2020; Beltagy et al., 2020), continuous pre-training on the job posting domain (Han and Eisenstein, 2019; Gururangan et al., 2020), and multi-task learning (Caruana, 1997). Our results show that the domain-adapted models significantly outperform their non-adapted counterparts, and single-task outperforms multi-task learning.

Hybrid data combining both tabular and textual content (e.g., financial reports) are quite pervasive in the real world. However, Question Answering (QA) over such hybrid data is largely neglected in existing research. In this work, we extract samples from real financial reports to build a new large-scale QA dataset containing both Tabular And Textual data, named TAT-QA, where numerical reasoning is usually required to infer the answer, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, counting, comparison/sorting, and the compositions. We further propose a novel QA model termed TAGOP, which is capable of reasoning over both tables and text. It adopts sequence tagging to extract relevant cells from the table along with relevant spans from the text to infer their semantics, and then applies symbolic reasoning over them with a set of aggregation operators to arrive at the final answer. TAGOPachieves 58.0% inF1, which is an 11.1% absolute increase over the previous best baseline model, according to our experiments on TAT-QA. But this result still lags far behind performance of expert human, i.e.90.8% in F1. It is demonstrated that our TAT-QA is very challenging and can serve as a benchmark for training and testing powerful QA models that address hybrid form data.

High-quality Machine Translation (MT) evaluation relies heavily on human judgments. Comprehensive error classification methods, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are expensive as they are time-consuming and can only be done by experts, whose availability may be limited especially for low-resource languages. On the other hand, just assigning overall scores, like Direct Assessment (DA), is simpler and faster and can be done by translators of any level, but is less reliable. In this paper, we introduce Error Span Annotation (ESA), a human evaluation protocol which combines the continuous rating of DA with the high-level error severity span marking of MQM. We validate ESA by comparing it to MQM and DA for 12 MT systems and one human reference translation (English to German) from WMT23. The results show that ESA offers faster and cheaper annotations than MQM at the same quality level, without the requirement of expensive MQM experts.

While most financial documents contain a combination of textual and tabular information, robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are essential for effectively accessing and reasoning over such content to perform complex numerical tasks. This paper introduces T^2-RAGBench, a benchmark comprising 32,908 question-context-answer triples, designed to evaluate RAG methods on real-world financial data. Unlike typical QA datasets that operate under Oracle-context settings, where the relevant context is explicitly provided, T^2-RAGBench challenges models to first retrieve the correct context before conducting numerical reasoning. Existing QA datasets involving text and tables typically contain context-dependent questions, which may yield multiple correct answers depending on the provided context. To address this, we transform these datasets into a context-independent format, enabling reliable RAG evaluation. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of popular RAG methods. Our analysis identifies Hybrid BM25, a technique that combines dense and sparse vectors, as the most effective approach for text-and-table data. However, results demonstrate that T^2-RAGBench remains challenging even for SOTA LLMs and RAG methods. Further ablation studies examine the impact of embedding models and corpus size on retrieval performance. T^2-RAGBench provides a realistic and rigorous benchmark for existing RAG methods on text-and-table data. Code and dataset are available online.

When retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems hallucinate, what geometric trace does this leave in embedding space? We introduce the Semantic Grounding Index (SGI), defined as the ratio of angular distances from the response to the question versus the context on the unit hypersphere S^{d-1}.Our central finding is semantic laziness: hallucinated responses remain angularly proximate to questions rather than departing toward retrieved contexts. On HaluEval (n=5,000), we observe large effect sizes (Cohen's d ranging from 0.92 to 1.28) across five embedding models with mean cross-model correlation r=0.85. Crucially, we derive from the spherical triangle inequality that SGI's discriminative power should increase with question-context angular separation θ(q,c)-a theoretical prediction confirmed empirically: effect size rises monotonically from d=0.61 -low θ(q,c), to d=1.27 -high θ(q,c), with AUC improving from 0.72 to 0.83. Subgroup analysis reveals that SGI excels on long responses (d=2.05) and short questions (d=1.22), while remaining robust across context lengths. Calibration analysis yields ECE=0.10, indicating SGI scores can serve as probability estimates, not merely rankings. A critical negative result on TruthfulQA (AUC=0.478) establishes that angular geometry measures topical engagement rather than factual accuracy. SGI provides computationally efficient, theoretically grounded infrastructure for identifying responses that warrant verification in production RAG deployments.

Modern open-domain question answering systems often rely on accurate and efficient retrieval components to find passages containing the facts necessary to answer the question. Recently, neural retrievers have gained popularity over lexical alternatives due to their superior performance. However, most of the work concerns popular languages such as English or Chinese. For others, such as Polish, few models are available. In this work, we present SilverRetriever, a neural retriever for Polish trained on a diverse collection of manually or weakly labeled datasets. SilverRetriever achieves much better results than other Polish models and is competitive with larger multilingual models. Together with the model, we open-source five new passage retrieval datasets.

Composing knowledge from multiple pieces of texts is a key challenge in multi-hop question answering. We present a multi-hop reasoning dataset, Question Answering via Sentence Composition(QASC), that requires retrieving facts from a large corpus and composing them to answer a multiple-choice question. QASC is the first dataset to offer two desirable properties: (a) the facts to be composed are annotated in a large corpus, and (b) the decomposition into these facts is not evident from the question itself. The latter makes retrieval challenging as the system must introduce new concepts or relations in order to discover potential decompositions. Further, the reasoning model must then learn to identify valid compositions of these retrieved facts using common-sense reasoning. To help address these challenges, we provide annotation for supporting facts as well as their composition. Guided by these annotations, we present a two-step approach to mitigate the retrieval challenges. We use other multiple-choice datasets as additional training data to strengthen the reasoning model. Our proposed approach improves over current state-of-the-art language models by 11% (absolute). The reasoning and retrieval problems, however, remain unsolved as this model still lags by 20% behind human performance.

AI-search evaluation commonly treats a prompt as a stable query that can be counted, classified, and replayed in isolation. A conversation makes that unit of analysis questionable: each user turn can add a constraint, revise an assumption, request evidence, or refer to alternatives established earlier. We replace latent "intent" with an observable construct, conversation-conditioned request state, and measure how that state is distributed across user turns. The analysis reuses frozen rules and the governed cohort of a preceding conversation study: 670 English commercial multi-turn conversations in a discovery-replication design and 7,463 public PRISM conversations from 1,389 participants. In the commercial corpus, the final prompt contains a median 35.6% of the session's unique user-side content vocabulary; in PRISM, the median is 36.4%. The final prompt contains at most half of that vocabulary in 68.4% and 74.3% of conversations, respectively. More importantly, transparent rules detect at least one request-state dimension in history but not in the final prompt in 50.3% of commercial conversations and 44.8% of PRISM conversations. Among dimension-bearing conversations, the final prompt reproduces the full observed dimension set in only 26.1% and 26.2%. At the same time, the final prompt adds a previously unseen dimension in 17.9% and 19.3%, showing that the endpoint is neither a summary nor merely a reference: it is often another state update. Length-matched nulls show that low lexical coverage is largely a consequence of turn length, so vocabulary results are interpreted as information availability, not semantic drift. The categorical results support session-level measurement for AI search. They do not estimate the causal effect of history on model answers.

We introduce Social IQa, the first largescale benchmark for commonsense reasoning about social situations. Social IQa contains 38,000 multiple choice questions for probing emotional and social intelligence in a variety of everyday situations (e.g., Q: "Jordan wanted to tell Tracy a secret, so Jordan leaned towards Tracy. Why did Jordan do this?" A: "Make sure no one else could hear"). Through crowdsourcing, we collect commonsense questions along with correct and incorrect answers about social interactions, using a new framework that mitigates stylistic artifacts in incorrect answers by asking workers to provide the right answer to a different but related question. Empirical results show that our benchmark is challenging for existing question-answering models based on pretrained language models, compared to human performance (>20% gap). Notably, we further establish Social IQa as a resource for transfer learning of commonsense knowledge, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple commonsense reasoning tasks (Winograd Schemas, COPA).