Answering complex questions often requires multi-step reasoning in order to obtain the final answer. Most research into decompositions of complex questions involves open-domain systems, which have shown success in using these decompositions for improved retrieval. In the machine reading setting, however, work to understand when decompositions are helpful is understudied. We conduct experiments on decompositions in machine reading to unify recent work in this space, using a range of models and datasets. We find that decompositions can be helpful in the few-shot case, giving several points of improvement in exact match scores. However, we also show that when models are given access to datasets with around a few hundred or more examples, decompositions are not helpful (and can actually be detrimental). Thus, our analysis implies that models can learn decompositions implicitly even with limited data.

Answering complex questions that require making latent decisions is a challenging task, especially when limited supervision is available. Recent works leverage the capabilities of large language models (LMs) to perform complex question answering in a few-shot setting by demonstrating how to output intermediate rationalizations while solving the complex question in a single pass. We introduce ``Successive Prompting'', where we iteratively break down a complex task into a simple task, solve it, and then repeat the process until we get the final solution. Successive prompting decouples the supervision for decomposing complex questions from the supervision for answering simple questions, allowing us to (1) have multiple opportunities to query in-context examples at each reasoning step (2) learn question decomposition separately from question answering, including using synthetic data, and (3) use bespoke (fine-tuned) components for reasoning steps where a large LM does not perform well. The intermediate supervision is typically manually written, which can be expensive to collect. We introduce a way to generate a synthetic dataset which can be used to bootstrap a model's ability to decompose and answer intermediate questions. Our best model (with successive prompting) achieves an improvement of ~5% absolute F1 on a few-shot version of the DROP dataset when compared with a state-of-the-art model with the same supervision.

This paper proposes a question-answering system that can answer questions whose supporting evidence is spread over multiple (potentially long) documents. The system, called Visconde, uses a three-step pipeline to perform the task: decompose, retrieve, and aggregate. The first step decomposes the question into simpler questions using a few-shot large language model (LLM). Then, a state-of-the-art search engine is used to retrieve candidate passages from a large collection for each decomposed question. In the final step, we use the LLM in a few-shot setting to aggregate the contents of the passages into the final answer. The system is evaluated on three datasets: IIRC, Qasper, and StrategyQA. Results suggest that current retrievers are the main bottleneck and that readers are already performing at the human level as long as relevant passages are provided. The system is also shown to be more effective when the model is induced to give explanations before answering a question. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/neuralmind-ai/visconde}.

Multi-hop reading comprehension requires not only the ability to reason over raw text but also the ability to combine multiple evidence. We propose a novel learning approach that helps language models better understand difficult multi-hop questions and perform "complex, compositional" reasoning. Our model first learns to decompose each multi-hop question into several sub-questions by a trainable question decomposer. Instead of answering these sub-questions, we directly concatenate them with the original question and context, and leverage a reading comprehension model to predict the answer in a sequence-to-sequence manner. By using the same language model for these two components, our best seperate/unified t5-base variants outperform the baseline by 7.2/6.1 absolute F1 points on a hard subset of DROP dataset.

Powerful generative models have led to recent progress in question generation (QG). However, it is difficult to measure advances in QG research since there are no standardized resources that allow a uniform comparison among approaches. In this paper, we introduce QG-Bench, a multilingual and multidomain benchmark for QG that unifies existing question answering datasets by converting them to a standard QG setting. It includes general-purpose datasets such as SQuAD for English, datasets from ten domains and two styles, as well as datasets in eight different languages. Using QG-Bench as a reference, we perform an extensive analysis of the capabilities of language models for the task. First, we propose robust QG baselines based on fine-tuning generative language models. Then, we complement automatic evaluation based on standard metrics with an extensive manual evaluation, which in turn sheds light on the difficulty of evaluating QG models. Finally, we analyse both the domain adaptability of these models as well as the effectiveness of multilingual models in languages other than English. QG-Bench is released along with the fine-tuned models presented in the paper https://github.com/asahi417/lm-question-generation, which are also available as a demo https://autoqg.net/.

Question-answering datasets require a broad set of reasoning skills. We show how to use question decompositions to teach language models these broad reasoning skills in a robust fashion. Specifically, we use widely available QDMR representations to programmatically create hard-to-cheat synthetic contexts for real questions in six multi-step reasoning datasets. These contexts are carefully designed to avoid reasoning shortcuts prevalent in real contexts that prevent models from learning the right skills. This results in a pretraining dataset, named TeaBReaC, containing 525K multi-step questions (with associated formal programs) covering about 900 reasoning patterns. We show that pretraining standard language models (LMs) on TeaBReaC before fine-tuning them on target datasets improves their performance by up to 13 F1 points across 4 multi-step QA datasets, with up to 21 point gain on more complex questions. The resulting models also demonstrate higher robustness, with a 5-8 F1 point improvement on two contrast sets. Furthermore, TeaBReaC pretraining substantially improves model performance and robustness even when starting with numerate LMs pretrained using recent methods (e.g., PReasM, POET). Our work thus shows how to effectively use decomposition-guided contexts to robustly teach multi-step reasoning.

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.

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。

Naturally-occurring information-seeking questions often contain questionable assumptions -- assumptions that are false or unverifiable. Questions containing questionable assumptions are challenging because they require a distinct answer strategy that deviates from typical answers to information-seeking questions. For instance, the question "When did Marie Curie discover Uranium?" cannot be answered as a typical when question without addressing the false assumption "Marie Curie discovered Uranium". In this work, we propose (QA)$^2$ (Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions), an open-domain evaluation dataset consisting of naturally-occurring search engine queries that may or may not contain questionable assumptions. To be successful on (QA)$^2$, systems must be able to detect questionable assumptions and also be able to produce adequate responses for both typical information-seeking questions and ones with questionable assumptions. We find that current models do struggle with handling questionable assumptions -- the best performing model achieves 59% human rater acceptability on abstractive QA with (QA)$^2$ questions, leaving substantial headroom for progress.

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.

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.

有效的多跳问答（QA）需要在多个分散的段落上进行推理，并提供答案的解释。大多数现有方法无法提供可解释的推理过程，以说明这些模型如何得出答案。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于多跳QA的抽象含义表示形式（QDAMR）的问题分解方法，该方法通过将多跳问题分解为更简单的子问题并按顺序回答它们来实现可解释的推理。由于注释分解很昂贵，因此我们首先将理解多跳问题的复杂性委托给AMR解析器。然后，我们通过基于所需的推理类型对相应的AMR图进行分割实现多跳问题的分解。最后，我们使用AMR到文本生成模型生成子问题，并使用现成的QA模型回答它们。 HOTPOTQA的实验结果表明，我们的方法在可解释的推理方面具有竞争力，并且QDAMR产生的子问题是良好的，表现优于现有的基于问题分解的多跳质量质量检查方法。

There has been great progress in unifying various table-to-text tasks using a single encoder-decoder model trained via multi-task learning (Xie et al., 2022). However, existing methods typically encode task information with a simple dataset name as a prefix to the encoder. This not only limits the effectiveness of multi-task learning, but also hinders the model's ability to generalize to new domains or tasks that were not seen during training, which is crucial for real-world applications. In this paper, we propose compositional task configurations, a set of prompts prepended to the encoder to improve cross-task generalization of unified models. We design the task configurations to explicitly specify the task type, as well as its input and output types. We show that this not only allows the model to better learn shared knowledge across different tasks at training, but also allows us to control the model by composing new configurations that apply novel input-output combinations in a zero-shot manner. We demonstrate via experiments over ten table-to-text tasks that our method outperforms the UnifiedSKG baseline by noticeable margins in both in-domain and zero-shot settings, with average improvements of +0.5 and +12.6 from using a T5-large backbone, respectively.

本文探讨了提高语言模型的零次学习能力的简单方法。我们表明，指令调整 - 通过对说明书中所述的任务集合微调语言模型 - 大幅提升零射门上看不见任务中的表现。我们采取预训练的语言模型和指令调整它通过自然语言指令模板语言表达了60NLP任务137B参数。我们评估这种指令调整模型，我们称之为FLAN，在看不见的任务类型。FLAN显着改善其未修饰的对应的性能和超过25的20个任务，我们评估零射门175BGPT-3。FLAN甚至GPT-3通过在安利，RTE，BoolQ，AI2-ARC，OpenbookQA和StoryCloze大比分胜过几拍。消融研究显示任务和模型的规模，这个数字是指令调整取得成功的关键组成部分。

Question Answering (QA) is a longstanding challenge in natural language processing. Existing QA works mostly focus on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills. The specialty in QA research hinders systems from modeling commonalities between tasks and generalization for wider applications. To address this issue, we present ProQA, a unified QA paradigm that solves various tasks through a single model. ProQA takes a unified structural prompt as the bridge and improves the QA-centric ability by structural prompt-based pre-training. Through a structurally designed prompt-based input schema, ProQA concurrently models the knowledge generalization for all QA tasks while keeping the knowledge customization for every specific QA task. Furthermore, ProQA is pre-trained with structural prompt-formatted large-scale synthesized corpus, which empowers the model with the commonly-required QA ability. Experimental results on 11 QA benchmarks demonstrate that ProQA consistently boosts performance on both full data fine-tuning, few-shot learning, and zero-shot testing scenarios. Furthermore, ProQA exhibits strong ability in both continual learning and transfer learning by taking the advantages of the structural prompt.

在有问题的回答需要常识的问题上，语言模型（例如，GPT-3）已用于生成表达有助于提高性能的背景知识的文本。然而，使用此类模型的成本很高。在这项工作中，我们对较小的语言模型产生有用的中间上下文，此处称为阐述。我们的框架在更新两个语言模型之间交替使用 - 阐述生成器和一个答案预测变量 - 允许每个语言都影响彼此。我们的模型使用少于GPT-3的参数的0.5％优于具有相似尺寸的替代方案，并在四个常识性问题上回答基准测试的GPT-3上的差距缩小。人类评估表明，生成的阐述的质量很高。

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

Neural language models (LMs) have achieved impressive results on various language-based reasoning tasks by utilizing latent knowledge encoded in their own pretrained parameters. To make this reasoning process more explicit, recent works retrieve a rationalizing LM's internal knowledge by training or prompting it to generate free-text rationales, which can be used to guide task predictions made by either the same LM or a separate reasoning LM. However, rationalizing LMs require expensive rationale annotation and/or computation, without any assurance that their generated rationales improve LM task performance or faithfully reflect LM decision-making. In this paper, we propose PINTO, an LM pipeline that rationalizes via prompt-based learning, and learns to faithfully reason over rationales via counterfactual regularization. First, PINTO maps out a suitable reasoning process for the task input by prompting a frozen rationalizing LM to generate a free-text rationale. Second, PINTO's reasoning LM is fine-tuned to solve the task using the generated rationale as context, while regularized to output less confident predictions when the rationale is perturbed. Across four datasets, we show that PINTO significantly improves the generalization ability of the reasoning LM, yielding higher performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution test sets. Also, we find that PINTO's rationales are more faithful to its task predictions than those generated by competitive baselines.

致致辞问题答案（CQA）旨在测试模型是否可以回答有关每个人都知道的勤杂朗语言的问题。结合外部知识库的事先作品已经显示了有希望的结果，但知识库是昂贵的构造，并且通常限于固定的一组关系。在本文中，我们专注于更好地利用\ Texit {隐式知识}存储在预先接受预先接受的语言模型中。虽然研究人员发现嵌入在预先接受预先训练的语言模型中的知识，但可以通过填写仔细设计的提取和文本分类的谨慎设计的空白来提取，但如果我们可以在输入和输入的CQA中采用此范例，仍然不清楚输出采取更灵活的形式。为此，我们调查了四种翻译方法，可以将自然问题转化为渗出风格的句子，从语言模型中更好地征求致辞知识，包括基于句法的模型，无监督的神经模型和两个监督的神经模型。此外，要结合不同的翻译方法，我们建议鼓励模型预测与未标记数据不同翻译问题的一致性。我们展示了我们在零拍摄设置中三个CQA数据集上的方法的有效性。我们表明，我们的方法与知识库改进的模型互补，并结合它们可以导致最先进的零射击性能。分析还揭示了不同的强化翻译方法的明显特征，并为什么结合它们导致巨大改进提供了洞察。

数学推理是人类智力的核心能力，在抽象思维和逻辑推理中对机器提出了独特的挑战。最近的大型预训练的语言模型（例如GPT-3）在以文本形式（例如数学单词问题（MWP））编写的数学推理任务上取得了显着的进步。但是，未知模型是否可以处理更复杂的问题，这些问题涉及数学推理，例如表格数据。为了填补空白，我们提出了表格数学单词问题（TABMWP），这是一个包含38,431个开放域级等级问题的新数据集，这些问题需要在文本和表格数据上进行数学推理。 TABMWP中的每个问题都与表格上下文对齐，该上下文作为图像，半结构化文本和结构化表。有两种类型的问题：自由文本和多选择，每个问题都用金解决方案注释以揭示多步推理过程。我们在TABMWP上评估了不同的预训练模型，包括在几次设置中的GPT-3模型。正如先前的研究所表明的那样，由于很少有GPT-3依赖于内在的示例的选择，因此其性能是不稳定的，并且可能会降解为几乎机会。处理TABMWP等复杂问题时，不稳定的问题更为严重。为了减轻这种情况，我们进一步提出了一种新颖的方法，即PresspG，该方法利用策略梯度学习从少量培训数据中选择中文示例，然后为测试示例构造相应的提示。实验结果表明，与随机选择相比，我们的方法在准确性度量上优于最佳基线，并显着降低了预测方差，这验证了其在选择性上下文示例中的有效性。