Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) requires models to answer factoid questions with no context given. The common way for this task is to train models on a large-scale annotated dataset to retrieve related documents and generate answers based on these documents. In this paper, we show that the ODQA architecture can be dramatically simplified by treating Large Language Models (LLMs) as a knowledge corpus and propose a Self-Prompting framework for LLMs to perform ODQA so as to eliminate the need for training data and external knowledge corpus. Concretely, we firstly generate multiple pseudo QA pairs with background passages and one-sentence explanations for these QAs by prompting LLMs step by step and then leverage the generated QA pairs for in-context learning. Experimental results show our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods by +8.8 EM averagely on three widely-used ODQA datasets, and even achieves comparable performance with several retrieval-augmented fine-tuned models.

知识密集型任务，例如开放域问题答案（QA），需要访问大量的世界知识或领域知识。知识密集型任务的一种常见方法是采用检索到阅读的管道，该管道首先从诸如Wikipedia之类的外部语料库中检索少数相关的上下文文档，然后预测在检索文档的条件下得到答案。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的观点，可以通过用大型语言模型生成器代替文档检索器来解决知识密集型任务。我们称我们的方法生成-Read Read（GenRead），该方法首先提示大型语言模型根据给定问题生成上下文文档，然后读取生成的文档以产生最终答案。此外，我们提出了一种基于聚类的提示方法，该方法选择了不同的提示，从而产生了涵盖不同观点的生成文档，从而更好地回忆了可接受的答案。我们对三个不同的知识密集任务进行了广泛的实验，包括开放域质量检查，事实检查和对话系统。值得注意的是，GenRead在Triviaqa和WebQ上实现了71.6和54.4的精确匹配分数，显着超过了最先进的检索到+4.0和+3.9的最先进的dpr-fid，而无需从任何外部知识源中检索任何文档。最后，我们证明可以通过结合检索和生成来进一步提高模型性能。

Recent work has shown that large language models are capable of generating natural language reasoning steps or Chains-of-Thoughts (CoT) to answer a multi-step question when prompted to do so. This is insufficient, however, when the necessary knowledge is not available or up-to-date within a model's parameters. A straightforward approach to address this is to retrieve text from an external knowledge source using the question as a query and prepend it as context to the model's input. This, however, is also insufficient for multi-step QA where \textit{what to retrieve} depends on \textit{what has already been derived}. To address this issue we propose IRCoT, a new approach that interleaves retrieval with CoT for multi-step QA, guiding the retrieval with CoT and in turn using retrieved results to improve CoT. Our experiments with GPT3 show substantial improvements in retrieval (up to 22 points) and downstream QA (up to 16 points) over the baselines on four datasets: HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, and IIRC. Notably, our method also works well for much smaller models such as T5-Flan-large (0.7B) without any additional training.

Retrieval-augmented in-context learning has emerged as a powerful approach for addressing knowledge-intensive tasks using frozen language models (LM) and retrieval models (RM). Existing work has combined these in simple "retrieve-then-read" pipelines in which the RM retrieves passages that are inserted into the LM prompt. To begin to fully realize the potential of frozen LMs and RMs, we propose Demonstrate-Search-Predict (DSP), a framework that relies on passing natural language texts in sophisticated pipelines between an LM and an RM. DSP can express high-level programs that bootstrap pipeline-aware demonstrations, search for relevant passages, and generate grounded predictions, systematically breaking down problems into small transformations that the LM and RM can handle more reliably. We have written novel DSP programs for answering questions in open-domain, multi-hop, and conversational settings, establishing in early evaluations new state-of-the-art in-context learning results and delivering 37-200%, 8-40%, and 80-290% relative gains against vanilla LMs, a standard retrieve-then-read pipeline, and a contemporaneous self-ask pipeline, respectively.

最近的开放式域问题回答表明，新颖的测试问题之间的模型性能和那些在很大程度上与培训问题重叠的模型性能存在很大差异。然而，目前尚不清楚新颖的问题的哪些方面使他们成为挑战。在进行系统泛化的研究时，我们根据三个类别介绍和注释问题，这些类别测量了不同的水平和概括的种类：培训设定重叠，组成泛化（Comp-Gen）和新颖的实体概括（新实体）。在评估六个流行的参数和非参数模型时，我们发现，对于既定的自然问题和TriviaQA数据集，即使是Comp-Gen /新颖实体的最强的模型性能也是13.1 / 5.4％和9.6 / 1.5％，而与此相比降低对于完整的测试集 - 表示这些类型的问题所带来的挑战。此外，我们表明，虽然非参数模型可以相对良好地处理含有新颖实体的问题，但它们与那些需要组成泛化的问题斗争。最后，我们发现关键问题是：来自检索组件的级联错误，问题模式的频率和实体的频率。

关于信息检索的许多最新研究集中在如何从一项任务（通常具有丰富的监督数据）转移到有限的其他各种任务，并隐含地假设可以从一个任务概括到所有其余的任务。但是，这忽略了这样一个事实，即有许多多样化和独特的检索任务，每个任务都针对不同的搜索意图，查询和搜索域。在本文中，我们建议使用几乎没有散热的检索，每个任务都有一个简短的描述和一些示例。为了扩大一些示例的功能，我们提出了针对检索器（即将到来）的及时基本查询生成，该查询将大型语言模型（LLM）作为几个弹片查询生成器，并根据生成的数据创建特定于任务的检索器。通过LLM的概括能力提供动力，即要来源使得可以仅基于一些示例{没有自然问题或MS MARCO来训练％问题生成器或双重编码器，就可以仅基于一些示例{没有}来创建特定于任务的端到端检索。出乎意料的是，LLM提示不超过8个示例，允许双重编码器在MARCO（例如Colbert V2）上训练的大量工程模型平均在11个检索套件中超过1.2 NDCG。使用相同生成数据的进一步培训标准尺寸的重新级别可获得5.0点NDCG的改进。我们的研究确定，查询产生比以前观察到的更有效，尤其是在给出少量特定于任务知识的情况下。

Entities, as important carriers of real-world knowledge, play a key role in many NLP tasks. We focus on incorporating entity knowledge into an encoder-decoder framework for informative text generation. Existing approaches tried to index, retrieve, and read external documents as evidence, but they suffered from a large computational overhead. In this work, we propose an encoder-decoder framework with an entity memory, namely EDMem. The entity knowledge is stored in the memory as latent representations, and the memory is pre-trained on Wikipedia along with encoder-decoder parameters. To precisely generate entity names, we design three decoding methods to constrain entity generation by linking entities in the memory. EDMem is a unified framework that can be used on various entity-intensive question answering and generation tasks. Extensive experimental results show that EDMem outperforms both memory-based auto-encoder models and non-memory encoder-decoder models.

Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the stored knowledge in these models may inevitably be incomplete, out-of-date, or incorrect. This motivates the need to utilize external knowledge to assist LLMs. Unfortunately, current methods for incorporating external knowledge often require additional training or fine-tuning, which can be costly and may not be feasible for LLMs. To address this issue, we propose a novel post-processing approach, rethinking with retrieval (RR), which retrieves relevant external knowledge based on the decomposed reasoning steps obtained from the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. This lightweight approach does not require additional training or fine-tuning and is not limited by the input length of LLMs. We evaluate the effectiveness of RR through extensive experiments with GPT-3 on three complex reasoning tasks: commonsense reasoning, temporal reasoning, and tabular reasoning. Our results show that RR can produce more faithful explanations and improve the performance of LLMs.

As large language models (LLMs) grow larger and more sophisticated, assessing their "reasoning" capabilities in natural language grows more challenging. Recent question answering (QA) benchmarks that attempt to assess reasoning are often limited by a narrow scope of covered situations and subject matters. We introduce WikiWhy, a QA dataset built around a novel auxiliary task: explaining why an answer is true in natural language. WikiWhy contains over 9,000 "why" question-answer-rationale triples, grounded on Wikipedia facts across a diverse set of topics. Each rationale is a set of supporting statements connecting the question to the answer. WikiWhy serves as a benchmark for the reasoning capabilities of LLMs because it demands rigorous explicit rationales for each answer to demonstrate the acquisition of implicit commonsense knowledge, which is unlikely to be easily memorized. GPT-3 baselines achieve only 38.7% human-evaluated correctness in the end-to-end answer & explain condition, leaving significant room for future improvements.

在该职位论文中，我们提出了一种新方法，以基于问题的产生和实体链接来生成文本的知识库（KB）。我们认为，所提出的KB类型具有传统符号KB的许多关键优势：尤其是由小型模块化组件组成，可以在组合上合并以回答复杂的查询，包括涉及“多跳跃”的关系查询和查询。“推论。但是，与传统的KB不同，该信息商店与常见的用户信息需求相符。

在维持预审预定序列模型的灵活性的同时，是否有利于常识性推理，这仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。为了调查这个问题，我们开发了生成的知识提示，该提示包括从语言模型中生成知识，然后在回答问题时提供知识作为附加输入。我们的方法不需要特定于任务的监督知识集成或访问结构化的知识库，但它可以提高四个常识性推理任务上的大规模，最先进的模型的性能，从而实现最先进-ART结果取决于数值常识（NumerSense），通用常识性（Commonsenseqa 2.0）和科学常识（QASC）基准。产生的知识促使大型语言模型是灵活的外部知识来源，以改善常识性推理。我们的代码可从https://github.com/liujch1998/gkp获得

大型语言模型在各种任务上显示出令人印象深刻的几次结果。但是，当知识是此类结果的关键时，就像问题回答和事实检查之类的任务一样，似乎需要存储知识的大量参数计数。众所周知，检索增强模型可以在不需要多个参数的情况下在知识密集的任务上表现出色，但是目前尚不清楚它们是否在几个弹药设置中工作。在这项工作中，我们介绍了地图集，这是一个经过精心设计和预先训练的增强语言模型，能够通过很少的培训示例学习知识密集型任务。我们对包括MMLU，苏格兰短裙和归类等各种任务进行评估，并研究文档索引内容的影响，表明它可以很容易地进行更新。值得注意的是，在自然问题上仅使用64个示例在自然问题上达到超过42 \％的准确性，尽管参数少了50倍，但比540B参数模型的表现优于540b参数模型。

预审前的语言模型通过提供高质量的上下文化单词嵌入来显着改善了下游语言理解任务（包括提取性问题）的性能。但是，培训问答模型仍然需要大量特定域的注释数据。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个合作的自我训练框架RGX，用于自动生成更非平凡的问题 - 解答对以提高模型性能。 RGX建立在带有答案实体识别器，问题生成器和答案提取器的交互式学习环境的蒙版答案提取任务上。给定带有蒙版实体的段落，生成器会在实体周围生成一个问题，并培训了提取器，以提取蒙面实体，并使用生成的问题和原始文本。该框架允许对任何文本语料库的问题产生和回答模型进行培训，而无需注释。实验结果表明，RGX优于最先进的语言模型（SOTA）的语言模型，并在标准提问基准的基准上采用转移学习方法，并在给定的模型大小和传输学习设置下产生新的SOTA性能。

Supervised Question Answering systems (QA systems) rely on domain-specific human-labeled data for training. Unsupervised QA systems generate their own question-answer training pairs, typically using secondary knowledge sources to achieve this outcome. Our approach (called PIE-QG) uses Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) to generate synthetic training questions from paraphrased passages and uses the question-answer pairs as training data for a language model for a state-of-the-art QA system based on BERT. Triples in the form of <subject, predicate, object> are extracted from each passage, and questions are formed with subjects (or objects) and predicates while objects (or subjects) are considered as answers. Experimenting on five extractive QA datasets demonstrates that our technique achieves on-par performance with existing state-of-the-art QA systems with the benefit of being trained on an order of magnitude fewer documents and without any recourse to external reference data sources.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.

知识密集型语言任务（苏格兰信）通常需要大量信息来提供正确的答案。解决此问题的一种流行范式是将搜索系统与机器读取器相结合，前者检索支持证据，后者检查它们以产生答案。最近，读者组成部分在大规模预培养的生成模型的帮助下见证了重大进展。同时，搜索组件中的大多数现有解决方案都依赖于传统的``索引 - retrieve-then-Rank''管道，该管道遭受了巨大的内存足迹和端到端优化的困难。受到最新构建基于模型的IR模型的努力的启发，我们建议用新颖的单步生成模型替换传统的多步搜索管道，该模型可以极大地简化搜索过程并以端到端的方式进行优化。我们表明，可以通过一组经过适当设计的预训练任务来学习强大的生成检索模型，并被采用以通过进一步的微调来改善各种下游苏格兰短裙任务。我们将预训练的生成检索模型命名为Copusbrain，因为有关该语料库的所有信息均以其参数进行编码，而无需构造其他索引。经验结果表明，在苏格兰语基准上的检索任务并建立了新的最新性能，Copusbrain可以极大地超过强大的基准。我们还表明，在零农源和低资源设置下，科体班运行良好。

Open-domain question answering relies on efficient passage retrieval to select candidate contexts, where traditional sparse vector space models, such as TF-IDF or BM25, are the de facto method. In this work, we show that retrieval can be practically implemented using dense representations alone, where embeddings are learned from a small number of questions and passages by a simple dualencoder framework. When evaluated on a wide range of open-domain QA datasets, our dense retriever outperforms a strong Lucene-BM25 system greatly by 9%-19% absolute in terms of top-20 passage retrieval accuracy, and helps our end-to-end QA system establish new state-of-the-art on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks. 1 * Equal contribution 1 The code and trained models have been released at https://github.com/facebookresearch/DPR.

Large pre-trained language models have been shown to store factual knowledge in their parameters, and achieve state-of-the-art results when fine-tuned on downstream NLP tasks. However, their ability to access and precisely manipulate knowledge is still limited, and hence on knowledge-intensive tasks, their performance lags behind task-specific architectures. Additionally, providing provenance for their decisions and updating their world knowledge remain open research problems. Pre-trained models with a differentiable access mechanism to explicit nonparametric memory can overcome this issue, but have so far been only investigated for extractive downstream tasks. We explore a general-purpose fine-tuning recipe for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) -models which combine pre-trained parametric and non-parametric memory for language generation. We introduce RAG models where the parametric memory is a pre-trained seq2seq model and the non-parametric memory is a dense vector index of Wikipedia, accessed with a pre-trained neural retriever. We compare two RAG formulations, one which conditions on the same retrieved passages across the whole generated sequence, and another which can use different passages per token. We fine-tune and evaluate our models on a wide range of knowledge-intensive NLP tasks and set the state of the art on three open domain QA tasks, outperforming parametric seq2seq models and task-specific retrieve-and-extract architectures. For language generation tasks, we find that RAG models generate more specific, diverse and factual language than a state-of-the-art parametric-only seq2seq baseline.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results across a variety of tasks while requiring little or no direct supervision. Further, there is mounting evidence that LLMs may have potential in information-seeking scenarios. We believe the ability of an LLM to attribute the text that it generates is likely to be crucial for both system developers and users in this setting. We propose and study Attributed QA as a key first step in the development of attributed LLMs. We develop a reproducable evaluation framework for the task, using human annotations as a gold standard and a correlated automatic metric that we show is suitable for development settings. We describe and benchmark a broad set of architectures for the task. Our contributions give some concrete answers to two key questions (How to measure attribution?, and How well do current state-of-the-art methods perform on attribution?), and give some hints as to how to address a third key question (How to build LLMs with attribution?).

目前用于开放域问题的最先进的生成模型（ODQA）专注于从非结构化文本信息生成直接答案。但是，大量的世界知识存储在结构化数据库中，并且需要使用SQL等查询语言访问。此外，查询语言可以回答需要复杂推理的问题，以及提供完全的解释性。在本文中，我们提出了一个混合框架，将文本和表格证据占据了输入，并根据哪种形式更好地回答这个问题而生成直接答案或SQL查询。然后可以在关联的数据库上执行生成的SQL查询以获得最终答案。据我们所知，这是第一种将Text2SQL与ODQA任务应用于ODQA任务的论文。凭经验，我们证明，在几个ODQA数据集上，混合方法始终如一地优于仅采用大边缘的均匀输入的基线模型。具体地，我们使用T5基础模型实现OpenSquad数据集的最先进的性能。在一个详细的分析中，我们证明能够生成结构的SQL查询可以始终带来增益，特别是对于那些需要复杂推理的问题。