Embedding models play a pivotal role in modern NLP applications such as document retrieval. However, existing embedding models are limited to encoding short documents of typically 512 tokens, restrained from application scenarios requiring long inputs. This paper explores context window extension of existing embedding models, pushing their input length to a maximum of 32,768. We begin by evaluating the performance of existing embedding models using our newly constructed LongEmbed benchmark, which includes two synthetic and four real-world tasks, featuring documents of varying lengths and dispersed target information. The benchmarking results highlight huge opportunities for enhancement in current models. Via comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that training-free context window extension strategies can effectively increase the input length of these models by several folds. Moreover, comparison of models using Absolute Position Encoding (APE) and Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE) reveals the superiority of RoPE-based embedding models in context window extension, offering empirical guidance for future models. Our benchmark, code and trained models will be released to advance the research in long context embedding models.

Large language model agents have exhibited exceptional performance across a range of complex interactive tasks. Recent approaches have utilized tuning with expert trajectories to enhance agent performance, yet they primarily concentrate on outcome rewards, which may lead to errors or suboptimal actions due to the absence of process supervision signals. In this paper, we introduce the **I**terative step-level **P**rocess **R**efinement **(IPR)** framework, which provides detailed step-by-step guidance to enhance agent training. Specifically, we adopt the Monte Carlo method to estimate step-level rewards. During each iteration, the agent explores along the expert trajectory and generates new actions. These actions are then evaluated against the corresponding step of expert trajectory using step-level rewards. Such comparison helps identify discrepancies, yielding contrastive action pairs that serve as training data for the agent. Our experiments on three complex agent tasks demonstrate that our framework outperforms a variety of strong baselines. Moreover, our analytical finds highlight the effectiveness of IPR in augmenting action efficiency and its applicability to diverse models.

This paper explores to construct a general text evaluator based on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs), a domain predominantly occupied by commercial counterparts such as GPT-4. Recognizing the limitations of open-source models like Llama in evaluative tasks, we introduce InstructEval, a general multi-aspect text evaluator developed through instruction tuning of open-source LLMs. To overcome the shortage of annotated resources for multi-aspect evaluations, InstructEval combines extensive open Human Preference Modeling (HPM) datasets with a small set of multi-aspect annotated data.This approach not only enhances effectiveness in overall evaluation tasks but also exhibits improved performance in multi-aspect evaluation tasks.As demonstrated by our extensive experiments, InstructEval achieves comparable or superior performance to commercial LLMs like ChatGPT or GPT-4 in terms of both overall and multi-aspect evaluation.

Fine-tuning on agent-environment interaction trajectory data holds significant promise for surfacing generalized agent capabilities in open-source large language models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce AgentBank, by far the largest trajectory tuning data collection featuring more than 50k diverse high-quality interaction trajectories which comprises 16 tasks covering five distinct agent skill dimensions. Leveraging a novel annotation pipeline, we are able to scale the annotated trajectories and generate a trajectory dataset with minimized difficulty bias. Furthermore, we fine-tune LLMs on AgentBank to get a series of agent models, Samoyed. Our comparative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of scaling the interaction trajectory data to acquire generalized agent capabilities. Additional studies also reveal some key observations regarding trajectory tuning and agent skill generalization.

Coherence evaluation aims to assess the organization and structure of a discourse, which remains challenging even in the era of large language models. Due to the scarcity of annotated data, data augmentation is commonly used for training coherence evaluation models. However, previous augmentations for this task primarily rely on heuristic rules, lacking designing criteria as guidance.In this paper, we take inspiration from linguistic theory of discourse structure, and propose a data augmentation framework named CoUDA. CoUDA breaks down discourse coherence into global and local aspects, and designs augmentation strategies for both aspects, respectively.Especially for local coherence, we propose a novel generative strategy for constructing augmentation samples, which involves post-pretraining a generative model and applying two controlling mechanisms to control the difficulty of generated samples. During inference, CoUDA also jointly evaluates both global and local aspects to comprehensively assess the overall coherence of a discourse.Extensive experiments in coherence evaluation show that, with only 233M parameters, CoUDA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both pointwise scoring and pairwise ranking tasks, even surpassing recent GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 based metrics.

A crucial issue of current text generation models is that they often uncontrollably generate text that is factually inconsistent with inputs. Due to lack of annotated data, existing factual consistency metrics usually train evaluation models on synthetic texts or directly transfer from other related tasks, such as question answering (QA) and natural language inference (NLI).Bias in synthetic text or upstream tasks makes them perform poorly on text actually generated by language models, especially for general evaluation for various tasks. To alleviate this problem, we propose a weakly supervised framework named WeCheck that is directly trained on actual generated samples from language models with weakly annotated labels.WeCheck first utilizes a generative model to infer the factual labels of generated samples by aggregating weak labels from multiple resources.Next, we train a simple noise-aware classification model as the target metric using the inferred weakly supervised information.Comprehensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate the strong performance of WeCheck, achieving an average absolute improvement of 3.3% on the TRUE benchmark over 11B state-of-the-art methods using only 435M parameters.Furthermore, it is up to 30 times faster than previous evaluation methods, greatly improving the accuracy and efficiency of factual consistency evaluation.

Recognizing flat, overlapped and discontinuous entities uniformly has been paid increasing attention. Among these works, Seq2Seq formulation prevails for its flexibility and effectiveness. It arranges the output entities into a specific target sequence. However, it introduces bias by assigning all the probability mass to the observed sequence. To alleviate the bias, previous works either augment the data with possible sequences or resort to other formulations. In this paper, we stick to the Seq2Seq formulation and propose a reranking-based approach. It redistributes the likelihood among candidate sequences depending on their performance via a contrastive loss. Extensive experiments show that our simple yet effective method consistently boosts the baseline, and yields competitive or better results compared with the state-of-the-art methods on 8 widely-used datasets for Named Entity Recognition.

Large neural-based dialog generation models have been applied in many real-life scenarios, yet they are prone to hallucination and tend to produce factually inaccurate outputs which raise great concerns. To alleviate this problem, we propose a plug-and-play retrieval-based framework IKA, which leverages in-context learning and retrieval techniques to enhance LLMs on knowledge grounded dialog generation. We design thorough experiments on a large-scale knowledge graph with 1M+ facts to investigate the effectiveness and generalization of our framework. Experiments show that our method surpasses previous training-based SOTA by a large margin, specifically 46.67% in BLEU4, 26.01% in ROUGE-L, 122.90% in BARTScore and 30.50% in Entity Coverage F1. Further analysis show promising abilities of LLMs to perform knowledge-intensive tasks, which is previously considered weak and understudied.

Though model robustness has been extensively studied in language understanding, the robustness of Seq2Seq generation remains understudied.In this paper, we conduct the first quantitative analysis on the robustness of pre-trained Seq2Seq models. We find that even current SOTA pre-trained Seq2Seq model (BART) is still vulnerable, which leads to significant degeneration in faithfulness and informativeness for text generation tasks.This motivated us to further propose a novel adversarial augmentation framework, namely AdvSeq, for generally improving faithfulness and informativeness of Seq2Seq models via enhancing their robustness. AdvSeq automatically constructs two types of adversarial augmentations during training, including implicit adversarial samples by perturbing word representations and explicit adversarial samples by word swapping, both of which effectively improve Seq2Seq robustness.Extensive experiments on three popular text generation tasks demonstrate that AdvSeq significantly improves both the faithfulness and informativeness of Seq2Seq generation under both automatic and human evaluation settings.

Traditional methods for named entity recognition (NER) classify mentions into a fixed set of pre-defined entity types. However, in many real-world scenarios, new entity types are incrementally involved. To investigate this problem, continual learning is introduced for NER. However, the existing method depends on the relevance between tasks and is prone to inter-type confusion. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage framework Learn-and-Review (L&R) for continual NER under the type-incremental setting to alleviate the above issues. Specifically, for the learning stage, we distill the old knowledge from teacher to a student on the current dataset. For the reviewing stage, we first generate synthetic samples of old types to augment the dataset. Then, we further distill new knowledge from the above student and old knowledge from the teacher to get an enhanced student on the augmented dataset. This stage has the following advantages: (1) The synthetic samples mitigate the gap between the old and new task and thus enhance the further distillation; (2) Different types of entities are jointly seen during training which alleviates the inter-type confusion. Experimental results show that L&R outperforms the state-of-the-art method on CoNLL-03 and OntoNotes-5.0.

Despite being able to generate fluent and grammatical text, current Seq2Seq summarization models still suffering from the unfaithful generation problem.In this paper, we study the faithfulness of existing systems from a new perspective of factual robustness which is the ability to correctly generate factual information over adversarial unfaithful information.We first measure a model’sfactual robustness by its success rate to defend against adversarial attacks when generating factual information.The factual robustness analysis on a wide range of current systems shows its good consistency with human judgments on faithfulness.Inspired by these findings, we propose to improve the faithfulness of a model by enhancing its factual robustness.Specifically, we propose a novel training strategy, namely FRSUM, which teaches the model to defend against both explicit adversarial samples and implicit factual adversarial perturbations.Extensive automatic and human evaluation results show that FRSUM consistently improves the faithfulness of various Seq2Seq models, such as T5, BART.

Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for the Seq2Seq architecture, as Seq2Seq is not good at analyzing long-distance relations in text. In this paper, we present BASS, a novel framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph, which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of context and conveys rich relations between phrases. Further, a graph-based encoder-decoder model is proposed to improve both the document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure. Specifically, several graph augmentation methods are designed to encode both the explicit and implicit relations in the text while the graph-propagation attention mechanism is developed in the decoder to select salient content into the summary. Empirical results show that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements for both long-document and multi-document summarization tasks.

In this paper, we argue that elementary discourse unit (EDU) is a more appropriate textual unit of content selection than the sentence unit in abstractive summarization. To well handle the problem of composing EDUs into an informative and fluent summary, we propose a novel summarization method that first designs an EDU selection model to extract and group informative EDUs and then an EDU fusion model to fuse the EDUs in each group into one sentence. We also design the reinforcement learning mechanism to use EDU fusion results to reward the EDU selection action, boosting the final summarization performance. Experiments on CNN/Daily Mail have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.