242 research outputs found
RECOMP: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LMs with Compression and Selective Augmentation
Retrieving documents and prepending them in-context at inference time
improves performance of language model (LMs) on a wide range of tasks. However,
these documents, often spanning hundreds of words, make inference substantially
more expensive. We propose compressing the retrieved documents into textual
summaries prior to in-context integration. This not only reduces the
computational costs but also relieves the burden of LMs to identify relevant
information in long retrieved documents. We present two compressors -- an
extractive compressor which selects useful sentences from retrieved documents
and an abstractive compressor which generates summaries by synthesizing
information from multiple documents. Both compressors are trained to improve
LMs' performance on end tasks when the generated summaries are prepended to the
LMs' input, while keeping the summary concise.If the retrieved documents are
irrelevant to the input or offer no additional information to LM, our
compressor can return an empty string, implementing selective augmentation.We
evaluate our approach on language modeling task and open domain question
answering task. We achieve a compression rate of as low as 6% with minimal loss
in performance for both tasks, significantly outperforming the off-the-shelf
summarization models. We show that our compressors trained for one LM can
transfer to other LMs on the language modeling task and provide summaries
largely faithful to the retrieved documents
Concise Answers to Complex Questions: Summarization of Long-form Answers
Long-form question answering systems provide rich information by presenting
paragraph-level answers, often containing optional background or auxiliary
information. While such comprehensive answers are helpful, not all information
is required to answer the question (e.g. users with domain knowledge do not
need an explanation of background). Can we provide a concise version of the
answer by summarizing it, while still addressing the question? We conduct a
user study on summarized answers generated from state-of-the-art models and our
newly proposed extract-and-decontextualize approach. We find a large proportion
of long-form answers (over 90%) in the ELI5 domain can be adequately summarized
by at least one system, while complex and implicit answers are challenging to
compress. We observe that decontextualization improves the quality of the
extractive summary, exemplifying its potential in the summarization task. To
promote future work, we provide an extractive summarization dataset covering 1K
long-form answers and our user study annotations. Together, we present the
first study on summarizing long-form answers, taking a step forward for QA
agents that can provide answers at multiple granularities.Comment: ACL 2023 Long Pape
Sequentially Sampled Chunk Conformer for Streaming End-to-End ASR
This paper presents an in-depth study on a Sequentially Sampled Chunk
Conformer, SSC-Conformer, for streaming End-to-End (E2E) ASR. The SSC-Conformer
first demonstrates the significant performance gains from using the
sequentially sampled chunk-wise multi-head self-attention (SSC-MHSA) in the
Conformer encoder by allowing efficient cross-chunk interactions while keeping
linear complexities. Furthermore, it explores taking advantage of chunked
convolution to make use of the chunk-wise future context and integrates with
casual convolution in the convolution layers to further reduce CER. We verify
the proposed SSC-Conformer on the AISHELL-1 benchmark and experimental results
show that a state-of-the-art performance for streaming E2E ASR is achieved with
CER 5.33% without LM rescoring. And, owing to its linear complexity, the
SSC-Conformer can train with large batch sizes and infer more efficiently.Comment: This paper has been submitted to ICASSP 202
P-vectors: A Parallel-Coupled TDNN/Transformer Network for Speaker Verification
Typically, the Time-Delay Neural Network (TDNN) and Transformer can serve as
a backbone for Speaker Verification (SV). Both of them have advantages and
disadvantages from the perspective of global and local feature modeling. How to
effectively integrate these two style features is still an open issue. In this
paper, we explore a Parallel-coupled TDNN/Transformer Network (p-vectors) to
replace the serial hybrid networks. The p-vectors allows TDNN and Transformer
to learn the complementary information from each other through Soft Feature
Alignment Interaction (SFAI) under the premise of preserving local and global
features. Also, p-vectors uses the Spatial Frequency-channel Attention (SFA) to
enhance the spatial interdependence modeling for input features. Finally, the
outputs of dual branches of p-vectors are combined by Embedding Aggregation
Layer (EAL). Experiments show that p-vectors outperforms MACCIF-TDNN and
MFA-Conformer with relative improvements of 11.5% and 13.9% in EER on
VoxCeleb1-O.Comment: Accepted by INTERSPEECH 202
Research on Concrete Durability Improving for Existing Island-Building and Its Application
China’s coastal cities contain a large number of islands with abundant human activities, in which buildings are in a typical marine corrosion environment and the corrosion of reinforced concrete structures is very prominent. This paper makes research work on two aspects: (1) the durability assessment and durability improvement after a thorough investigation of the architecture of Xiangtan County, Ningbo city, on an island and (2) the application research of the bidirectional electromigration rehabilitation (BIEM) technology to enhance the durability of existing island building life. This paper designs a set of BIEM equipment based on solar power supply and develops a BIEM control system with an automatic control system based on 3G networks, which realized the functions of indoor BIEM parameter setting, data receiving and wire breaking, and so on. The research results show that the complete set of BIEM techniques proposed in this paper can effectively remove the chloride ion in the concrete and transfer the rust inhibitor to the surface of steel bar. The research results have important effects on the durability and safety of island buildings
A Critical Evaluation of Evaluations for Long-form Question Answering
Long-form question answering (LFQA) enables answering a wide range of
questions, but its flexibility poses enormous challenges for evaluation. We
perform the first targeted study of the evaluation of long-form answers,
covering both human and automatic evaluation practices. We hire domain experts
in seven areas to provide preference judgments over pairs of answers, along
with free-form justifications for their choices. We present a careful analysis
of experts' evaluation, which focuses on new aspects such as the
comprehensiveness of the answer. Next, we examine automatic text generation
metrics, finding that no existing metrics are predictive of human preference
judgments. However, some metrics correlate with fine-grained aspects of answers
(e.g., coherence). We encourage future work to move away from a single "overall
score" of the answer and adopt a multi-faceted evaluation, targeting aspects
such as factuality and completeness. We publicly release all of our annotations
and code to spur future work into LFQA evaluation.Comment: ACL 2023 Camera Ready, Code available at
https://github.com/carriex/lfqa_eva
Comprehensive Investigation on Associations between Dietary Intake and Blood Levels of Fatty Acids and Colorectal Cancer Risk
SLC29A1 single nucleotide polymorphisms as independent prognostic predictors for survival of patients with acute myeloid leukemia: an in vitro study
IGFBP2 Plays an Essential Role in Cognitive Development during Early Life
Identifying the mechanisms underlying cognitive development in early life is a critical objective. The expression of insulin-like growth factor binding protein 2 (IGFBP2) in the hippocampus increases during neonatal development and is associated with learning and memory, but a causal connection has not been established. Here, it is reported that neurons and astrocytes expressing IGFBP2 are distributed throughout the hippocampus. IGFBP2 enhances excitatory inputs onto CA1 pyramidal neurons, facilitating intrinsic excitability and spike transmission, and regulates plasticity at excitatory synapses in a cell-type specific manner. It facilitates long-term potentiation (LTP) by enhancing N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor-dependent excitatory postsynaptic current (EPSC), and enhances neurite proliferation and elongation. Knockout of igfbp2 reduces the numbers of pyramidal cells and interneurons, impairs LTP and cognitive performance, and reduces tonic excitation of pyramidal neurons that are all rescued by IGFBP2. The results provide insight into the requirement for IGFBP2 in cognition in early life
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