Teaching Smaller Language Models To Generalise To Unseen Compositional Questions

We equip a smaller Language Model to generalise to answering challenging compositional questions that have not been seen in training. To do so we propose a combination of multitask supervised pretraining on up to 93 tasks designed to instill diverse reasoning abilities, and a dense retrieval system that aims to retrieve a set of evidential paragraph fragments. Recent progress in question-answering has been achieved either through prompting methods against very large pretrained Language Models in zero or few-shot fashion, or by fine-tuning smaller models, sometimes in conjunction with information retrieval. We focus on the less explored question of the extent to which zero-shot generalisation can be enabled in smaller models with retrieval against a corpus within which sufficient information to answer a particular question may not exist. We establish strong baselines in this setting for diverse evaluation datasets (StrategyQA, CommonsenseQA, IIRC, DROP, Musique and ARC-DA), and show that performance can be significantly improved by adding retrieval-augmented training datasets which are designed to expose our models to a variety of heuristic reasoning strategies such as weighing partial evidence or ignoring an irrelevant context

Answering Unseen Questions With Smaller Language Models Using Rationale Generation and Dense Retrieval

When provided with sufficient explanatory context, smaller Language Models have been shown to exhibit strong reasoning ability on challenging short-answer question-answering tasks where the questions are unseen in training. We evaluate two methods for further improvement in this setting. Both methods focus on combining rationales generated by a larger Language Model with longer contexts created from a multi-hop dense retrieval system. The first method ($\textit{RR}$) involves training a Rationale Ranking model to score both generated rationales and retrieved contexts with respect to relevance and truthfulness. We then use the scores to derive combined contexts from both knowledge sources using a number of combinatory strategies. For the second method ($\textit{RATD}$) we train a smaller Reasoning model using retrieval-augmented training datasets such that it becomes proficient at utilising relevant information from longer text sequences that may be only partially evidential and frequently contain many irrelevant sentences. Generally we find that both methods are effective but that the $\textit{RATD}$ method is more straightforward to apply and produces the strongest results in the unseen setting on which we focus. Our single best Reasoning model using only 440 million parameters materially improves upon strong comparable prior baselines for unseen evaluation datasets (StrategyQA 58.9 $\rightarrow$ 61.7 acc., CommonsenseQA 63.6 $\rightarrow$ 72.7 acc., ARC-DA 31.6 $\rightarrow$ 52.1 F1, IIRC 25.5 $\rightarrow$ 27.3 F1) and a version utilising our prior knowledge of each type of question in selecting a context combination strategy does even better. Our proposed models also generally outperform direct prompts against much larger models (BLOOM 175B and StableVicuna 13B) in both few-shot chain-of-thought and few-shot answer-only settings

Anti-Search for the Glueball Candidate f_J(2220) in Two-Photon Interactions

Using 13.3 fb^{-1} of e^+e^- data recorded with the CLEO II and CLEO II.V detector configurations at CESR, we have searched for f_J(2220) decays to K^0_{S} K^0_{S} in untagged two-photon interactions. We report an upper limit on the product of the two-photon partial width and the branching fraction, Gamma_gamma gamma cdot B (f_J(2220) to K^0_{S} K^0_{S}) of less than 1.1 eV at the 95% C.L: systematic uncertainties are included. This dataset is four times larger than that used in the previous CLEO publication.Comment: 10 pages postscript, also available through http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/public/CLNS, Submitted to PRD (R

Two-Body B Meson Decays to η\eta and η′\eta^{'} -- Observation of B→ηB\to \eta{'}K$

In a sample of 6.6 million produced B mesons we have observed decays B -> eta' K, with branching fractions BR(B+ -> eta' K+ = 6.5 +1.5 -1.4 +- 0.9) x $10^{-5}$ and BR(B0 -> eta' K0 = 4.7 +2.7 -2.0 +- 0.9) x $10^{-5}$. We have searched with comparable sensitivity for 17 related decays to final states containing an eta or eta' meson accompanied by a single particle or low-lying resonance. Our upper limits for these constrain theoretical interpretations of the B -> eta' K signal.Comment: 12 page postscript file, postscript file also available through http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/public/CLN

How much compression should a scramjet inlet Do?

The supersonic combustion ramjet, or scramjet, is the engine cycle most suitable for sustained hypersonic flight in the atmosphere. This paper examines a key decision in the design of the inlet or intake of these hypersonic airbreathing engines, namely, the level of compression to be performed. Too much compression can lead to onerous system level issues including the need for bleed or variable geometry, while too little compression can result in low cycle efficiency and poor combustion of fuel. An analysis of the important factors that affect the choice of scramjet inlet compression ratio has been performed for hydrogen-fueled scramjets at Mach 6, 8, 10, and 12. It was found that contrary to classical thermodynamic analyses, scramjet cycle efficiency reaches an optimum at a relatively low compression ratio between 50 and 100 for all Mach numbers. Practical constraints related to nonequilibrium flow effects, inlet starting, and boundary-layer separation were also shown to prompt a desire for low compression ratio. The lower limit on compression was found to be set by the need to complete the combustion reaction in the available engine length and is therefore dependent on engine scale. On the basis of these factors it is recommended that scramjet inlet compression ratio be set to the minimum that satisfies the robust combustion requirement, with the caveat that it not be below 50 in order to maintain high cycle efficiency. For typical wind-tunnel-scale engines, this results in a requirement for the inlet to compress airflow entering the combustor to a pressure of approximately 1/2 atm, regardless of the flight Mach number

Measurement of the muonic branching fractions of the Υ(1S) and Υ(3S)

Using the CLEO detector at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, we have measured the muonic branching fractions B of the (1S) and (3S) to be (2.520.070.07)% and (2.020.190.33)%, respectively. © 1989 The American Physical Society

Recent progress in neutrino factory and muon collider research within the Muon collaboration

We describe the status of our effort to realize a first neutrino factory and the progress made in understanding the problems associated with the collection and cooling of muons towards that end. We summarize the physics that can be done with neutrino factories as well as with intense cold beams of muons. The physics potential of muon colliders is reviewed, both as Higgs Factories and compact high energy lepton colliders. The status and timescale of our research and development effort is reviewed as well as the latest designs in cooling channels including the promise of ring coolers in achieving longitudinal and transverse cooling simultaneously. We detail the efforts being made to mount an international cooling experiment to demonstrate the ionization cooling of muons