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arXiv

Modular Expert Merging for Biomedical Retrieval

Sameh Khattab, Jean-Philippe Corbeil, Osman Alperen Çinar-Koraş, Amin Dada, Julian Friedrich, Jiawei He, Douglas Teodoro, Jens Kleesiek

Adapting general-purpose LLMs into domain-specialized dense retrievers typically requires large-scale training on mixed-domain data. We show that merging independently trained domain-specialized experts consistently exceeds this approach across four decoder-only LLM families (0.6B-7B), four merging methods, and twelve medical and general retrieval tasks from MTEB, suggesting that parameter-space composition captures complementary domain strengths that large-scale mixed-domain training averages out. To further maximize expert quality, we introduce Synthesize-Train-Merge (STM), a modular framework that synthesizes hard negatives with a top-tier LLM and fine-tunes domain-specialized experts via LoRA before merging them, without continual pre-training. Synthesized hard negatives yield the largest gains for smaller models, and STM achieves strong performance on biomedical retrieval tasks while maintaining competitive general-domain results across all four backbone families.

arXiv

MAPLE: Metadata Conditioned LLM Pretraining for Locale-Aware Question Answering

Anjishnu Mukherjee, Ziwei Zhu, Antonios Anastasopoulos

Large language models can memorize competing locale-specific facts yet fail to select among them when the locale changes, defaulting instead to a single globally dominant answer. We formalize this as localized knowledge disambiguation and introduce LocalNewsQA, an 18,700-item English-news benchmark that pairs the same question across two locales and scores whether a model actually switches its answer when the locale changes. We also introduce MAPLE, a controlled family of decoder-only models pretrained with document-level geographic metadata (source URL, country, and continent) already present in the training corpus, and compare it to metadata-free controls trained on identical data with the same token budget, architecture, and optimization. In controlled experiments at 1B and 3B, with inference-time metadata fixed, pretraining with metadata in MAPLE produces measurable switching and improves accuracy on questions whose correct answer depends on locale. Ablations and external-benchmark evaluations further suggest that locale-conditioned prediction benefits from geographic provenance learned during pretraining and that these benefits strengthen at larger model sizes.

arXiv

CounterVid: Counterfactual Video Generation for Mitigating Action and Temporal Hallucinations in Video-Language Models

Tobia Poppi, Burak Uzkent, Amanmeet Garg, Lucas Porto, Garin Kessler, Yezhou Yang, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara, Florian Schiffers

Video-language models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal understanding but remain prone to hallucinations, especially when reasoning about actions and temporal order. Existing mitigation strategies, such as textual filtering or random video perturbations, often fail to address the root cause: over-reliance on language priors rather than fine-grained visual dynamics. We propose a scalable framework for counterfactual video generation that synthesizes videos differing only in actions or temporal structure while preserving scene context. Our pipeline combines multimodal LLMs for action proposal and editing guidance with diffusion-based image and video models to generate semantic hard negatives at scale. Using this framework, we build CounterVid, a synthetic dataset of ~26k preference pairs constructed from short counterfactual action clips and targeting both action recognition and controlled action-sequence ordering. We further introduce MixDPO, a unified Direct Preference Optimization approach that jointly leverages textual and visual preferences. Across Qwen2.5-VL and InternVL3 backbones, MixDPO substantially improves action recognition and temporal ordering, yields gains on most standard video hallucination benchmarks, and largely preserves general video understanding. Our source code, trained models, and dataset are available at https://aimagelab.github.io/CounterVid.

arXiv

AEScorer: An Agentic Evidence-Grounded Framework for Graded Factuality Verification

Hui Huang, Muyun Yang, Yuki Arase

Despite the significant advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), their factuality remains a critical challenge, creating a growing need for more nuanced factuality verification. Existing factuality verification methods do not capture graded judgments, even though factuality is better understood as a spectrum rather than a binary of right and wrong. To bridge this gap, we focus on graded factuality verification and propose AEScorer, an agentic evidence-grounded framework with two stages: agentic evidence acquisition and graded scoring. AEScorer first gathers and refines external evidence through agentic search, and then predicts a scalar factuality score to distinguish nuanced differences in factual correctness. We further construct GradedVeriBench, a benchmark for graded factuality verification spanning both general and multi-hop question answering. Experimental results on GradedVeriBench show that AEScorer substantially outperforms existing methods across both settings, demonstrating the value of coupling targeted evidence acquisition with graded scoring.

arXiv

TopiCLEAR: Adaptive embedding clustering for interpretable topic discovery from short texts

Aoi Fujita, Taichi Yamamoto, Yuri Nakayama, Ryota Kobayashi

Topic discovery is a fundamental technique for text mining that identifies abstract topics within large document collections. A recent approach to topic discovery is to cluster document or sentence embeddings, typically obtained from pre-trained language models, and represent each cluster as a topic. Despite their strong empirical performance, the design principles linking the geometry of embedding spaces to human-interpretable topic organization remain unclear. Clarifying the relationship between these geometric structures and topic interpretability is therefore a key challenge in topic discovery. In this study, we propose TopiCLEAR (Topic discovery by CLustering Embeddings with Adaptive dimensionality Reduction), a simple framework that integrates document embeddings with iterative clustering based on adaptive dimensionality reduction. TopiCLEAR is guided by the hypothesis that human-interpretable topics correspond to low-dimensional geometric structures in embedding spaces and leverages adaptive dimensionality reduction to identify them. We evaluate topic quality using a document-level approach that combines quantitative evaluation based on human-labeled data with qualitative assessment in the absence of ground-truth labels. Experiments on four benchmark datasets, covering both formal and informal texts, show that TopiCLEAR consistently achieves strong agreement with human annotations, particularly for short and informal texts. Furthermore, a case study on Twitter data demonstrates that TopiCLEAR produces more interpretable topics than Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), recovering both human-annotated topic structure and coherent sub-topic structure. These results highlight the effectiveness of clustering documents in a low-dimensional topic space for topic discovery.

arXiv

MENTOR: Reinforcement Learning via Flexible Teacher-Optimized Rewards for Tool-Use Distillation

ChangSu Choi, Hoyun Song, Dongyeon Kim, Minkyung Cho, WooHyeon Jung, Sunjin Park, NohHyeob Bae, Seona Yu, KyungTae Lim

Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), is an off-policy distillation method that suffers from poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization because it rigidly aligns with static teacher trajectories. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers an alternative, the capacity limitations of SLMs pose a severe dilemma: sparse outcome rewards provide insufficient guidance, whereas strict trajectory matching imposes overly restrictive constraints. To bridge this capacity-driven gap, we propose MENTOR, an on-policy distillation framework that introduces a flexible yet process-aware reward structure. Instead of enforcing rigid replication, MENTOR uses the teacher's reference to guide tool-use behavior, balancing behavioral alignment with downstream performance. Extensive experiments on controlled executable-tool benchmarks demonstrate that MENTOR improves OOD tool-use performance compared to SFT and strict RL baselines. Our findings suggest that within verifiable tool-use environments, flexible tool-use alignment offers a more effective approach than strict trajectory replication for developing adaptable small models.

arXiv

DeepPlanner: Scaling Planning Capability for Deep Research Agents via Advantage Shaping

Wei Fan, Wenlin Yao, Zheng Li, Feng Yao, Xin Liu, Liang Qiu, Qingyu Yin, Yangqiu Song, Bing Yin

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with multi-step reasoning and action generation abilities have shown promise in leveraging external tools to tackle complex tasks that require long-horizon planning. However, existing approaches either rely on implicit planning in the reasoning stage or introduce explicit planners without systematically addressing how to optimize the planning stage. As evidence, we observe that under vanilla reinforcement learning (RL), planning tokens exhibit significantly higher entropy than other action tokens, revealing uncertain decision points that remain under-optimized. To address this, we propose DeepPlanner, an end-to-end RL framework that effectively enhances the planning capabilities of deep research agents. Our approach shapes token-level advantage with an entropy-based term to allocate larger updates to high entropy tokens, and selectively upweights sample-level advantages for planning-intensive rollouts. Extensive experiments across seven deep research benchmarks demonstrate that DeepPlanner improves planning quality and achieves state-of-the-art results under a substantially lower training budget.

arXiv

LLM-Specific Utility for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Jiaming Zhang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is typically optimized for topical relevance, yet its success ultimately depends on whether retrieved passages are useful for a large language model (LLM) to generate correct and complete answers. We argue that such utility is often LLM-specific rather than universal, due to differences in models' knowledge, reasoning, and ability to leverage evidence. We formalize LLM-specific utility as the performance improvement of a target LLM when a passage is provided, compared to answering without evidence. To systematically study LLM-specific utility, we construct a benchmark of LLM-specific gold utilitarian passages for four LLMs (Qwen3-8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1-8B) on three QA datasets (Natural Questions, TriviaQA, and MS MARCO-FQA). Our analysis shows that utilitarian passages are model-dependent and non-transferable: each LLM performs best with its own utilitarian evidence, while evidence optimized for other LLMs is consistently suboptimal. Human-annotated evidence remains a strong general baseline but does not fully match individual LLM utility needs. We further introduce the LLM-specific utility judgment task and construct the corresponding benchmark, i.e., SpecUBench (LLM-Specific Utility Benchmark). Experiments show that existing utility-aware selection and scoring methods largely capture model-agnostic usefulness and struggle to reliably estimate LLM-specific utility. Overall, our findings highlight the limitations of current utility-aware retrieval and motivate generator-tailored evidence selection for improving RAG. Our code and datasets can be found at https://github.com/Trustworthy-Information-Access/LLM_specific_utility.

arXiv

Are Large Language Models Effective Knowledge Graph Constructors?

Ruirui Chen, Weifeng Jiang, Chengwei Qin, Bo Xiong, Kaiwen Wei, Fiona Liausvia, Pei Fang Tan, Ker Yung Chua, Dongkyu Choi, Mukkesh Kumar, Evelyn C. Law, Dennis Wang, Boon Kiat Quek

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are widely used in knowledge-intensive applications, yet it remains unclear how effectively current large language models (LLMs) can construct document-grounded KGs in a zero-shot, schema-free setting without relying on complex task-specific frameworks. We introduce Detail-to-Abstract Hierarchical Knowledge Graph (D2A-HKG) construction framework, which decomposes KG construction into three stages: initial extraction, splitting, and abstraction, and evaluates the resulting graphs from both semantic and structural perspectives. Using seven frontier LLMs, we benchmark zero-shot KG construction on CMW-Lit, a dataset derived from published paediatric research articles on children's mental well-being. CMW-Lit provides a challenging test bed due to its heterogeneous evidence, interconnected factors, and complex, statistically qualified relationships. Our results show that state-of-the-art LLMs can generally produce relevant and document-faithful triples with limited hallucination, while exhibiting substantially different extraction behaviors across the construction stages. These findings provide empirical insight into the strengths and limitations of frontier LLMs for direct knowledge graph construction. We further release CMW-Lit and the resulting knowledge graphs as resources for future research, with the generated graphs providing a strong foundation for expert refinement and downstream knowledge-intensive applications.

arXiv

A Survey of LLM Prompt Datasets: Taxonomy, Linguistic Patterns, and Practical Uses

Yuanming Zhang, Yan Lin, Arijit Khan, Huaiyu Wan

We compile 129 public LLM prompt datasets with more than 1.22TB and more than 673M instances and organize them into a unified taxonomy. We use seven datasets for detailed analysis and identify lexical, syntactic, and semantic patterns that distinguish prompts from general text. We evaluate these features in prompt filtering, source domain routing, and elicited response quality analysis. A 63 dimensional linguistic feature set that can be extracted on a CPU achieves over 91% of the F1 of GPU sentence embeddings and reduces latency per request by nearly half. In cross dataset routing, sentence embeddings reach 0.74 Macro-F1 and a structural feature subset reaches 0.61, compared with the chance level of 0.20. Structural routing features remain negatively associated with elicited response quality after prompt length is controlled on UltraFeedback. The apparent positive association of type to token ratio becomes much smaller under the same control. These findings support prompt processing pipelines that combine efficient structural features with robust semantic routing. Our catalogue, annotations, and code are given at https://github.com/ymzhang-cs/prompt-dataset-analysis.

arXiv

GSM8K-V: Can Vision Language Models Solve Grade School Math Word Problems in Visual Contexts

Fan Yuan, Yuchen Yan, Yifan Jiang, Haoran Zhao, Tao Feng, Jinyan Chen, Yanwei Lou, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen

Mathematical reasoning is a key capability for vision-language models (VLMs), yet current benchmarks mainly evaluate text-based or explicitly symbolic visual inputs. It remains unclear whether VLMs can reason mathematically when information must be perceived and inferred from images rather than read from explicit symbols. We introduce GSM8K-V, a benchmark transforming GSM8K into multi-image sequences with semantic equivalence preserved. By mapping text-based problems into visual form via an automated pipeline and human verification, we curate 1,319 high-quality samples. In GSM8K-V, quantities must be extracted through visual perception, and reasoning chains must be reconstructed by integrating implicit cues across scenes. Evaluation of 34 VLMs reveals a striking modality gap: while most models exceed 90\% on text, the best model achieves only 59\% on GSM8K-V, far below the 91\% human accuracy. Notably, models enhanced for visual math reasoning show no improvement on GSM8K-V despite large gains on existing benchmarks, confirming that it evaluates a distinct capability. Error analysis shows that the primary bottleneck lies in Implicit Visual Inference Error (IVIE), where models fail to recover visual semantics that are implied rather than explicitly stated. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/ZJU-REAL/GSM8K-V.

arXiv

Recurrence Meets Transformers for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

Davide Caffagni, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara

With the rapid advancement of multimodal retrieval and its application in LLMs and multimodal LLMs, increasingly complex retrieval tasks have emerged. Existing methods predominantly rely on task-specific fine-tuning of vision-language models and are limited to single-modality queries or documents. In this paper, we propose ReT-2, a unified retrieval model that supports multimodal queries, composed of both images and text, and searches across multimodal document collections where text and images coexist. ReT-2 leverages multi-layer representations and a recurrent Transformer architecture with LSTM-inspired gating mechanisms to dynamically integrate information across layers and modalities, capturing fine-grained visual and textual details. We evaluate ReT-2 on the challenging M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks across different retrieval configurations. Results demonstrate that ReT-2 consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse settings, while offering faster inference and reduced memory usage compared to prior approaches. When integrated into retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, ReT-2 also improves downstream performance on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek datasets. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/ReT-2

arXiv

LLM Analysis of 150+ years of German Parliamentary Debates on Migration Reveals Shift from Post-War Solidarity to Anti-Solidarity in the Last Decade

Aida Kostikova, Ole Pütz, Steffen Eger, Olga Sabelfeld, Benjamin Paassen

Migration has been a core topic in German political debate, from postwar expellee displacement to labor migration and recent refugee movements. Large-scale analysis of such political discourse has traditionally required extensive manual annotation, limiting coverage. Large language models (LLMs) offer a scalable alternative. Using a theory-driven annotation scheme, we examine how well LLMs annotate subtypes of solidarity and anti-solidarity in German parliamentary debates and whether the resulting labels support valid downstream inference. We first evaluate multiple LLMs across model size, prompting strategies, fine-tuning, historical versus contemporary data, and systematic errors. The strongest models, especially GPT-5 and gpt-oss-120B, achieve macro- F1 scores comparable to human agreement, although their systematic errors can bias downstream results. We therefore combine soft-label model outputs with Design-based Supervised Learning (DSL) to reduce bias in long-term trend estimates. Beyond the methodological evaluation, we interpret the resulting annotations from a social-scientific perspective across the Reichstag (1867- 1933), West German Bundestag (1949-1990) and Re-Unified German Bundestag (1990-2025) corpus to trace trends in solidarity and anti-solidarity toward migrants, with detailed analysis of postwar Germany (1949-1957) and contemporary Germany (2009-2025). We find relatively high levels of solidarity in the postwar period, especially in group-based and compassionate forms, and a marked rise in anti-solidarity since 2015. We argue that LLMs can support large-scale social-scientific text analysis, but their outputs require rigorous validation and, where systematic errors are present, statistical correction.

arXiv

Beyond the Rosetta Stone: Unification Forces in Generalization Dynamics

Carter Blum, Katja Filippova, Ann Yuan, Asma Ghandeharioun, Julian Zimmert, Fred Zhang, Jessica Hoffmann, Tal Linzen, Martin Wattenberg, Lucas Dixon, Mor Geva

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with cross-lingual knowledge transfer: they sometimes hallucinate when asked in one language about facts expressed in a different language during training. This work introduces a controlled setting to study the causes and training dynamics of this phenomenon by training small Transformer models from scratch on synthetic multilingual datasets. Depending on (1) the correlation between facts and the language they were learned in (informativeness), and (2) the ease of language identification (extractability), models either develop unified representations across languages or separate representations; only when representations are unified do facts transfer across languages. Based on these insights, we propose a unifying perspective which explains a range of prior observations concerning cross-lingual transfer in multilingual LLMs. Our work shows controlled settings can shed light on pre-training dynamics and suggests methods to encourage representational unification as part of training that would improve LLMs' cross-lingual transfer.

arXiv

AirLLM: Diffusion Policy-based Adaptive LoRA for Remote Fine-Tuning of LLM over the Air

Shiyi Yang, Xiaoxue Yu, Rongpeng Li, Jianhang Zhu, Zhifeng Zhao, Honggang Zhang

Operating Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is increasingly challenged by limited communication bandwidth and strained computational and memory costs. Thus, cloud-assisted remote fine-tuning becomes indispensable. Nevertheless, existing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) approaches typically employ fixed or heuristic rank configurations, and the subsequent over-the-air transmission of all LoRA parameters could be rather inefficient. To address this limitation, we develop AirLLM, a hierarchical diffusion policy framework for communication-aware LoRA adaptation. Specifically, AirLLM models the rank configuration as a structured action vector that spans all LoRA-inserted projections. To solve the underlying high-dimensional sequential decision-making problem, a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent generates coarse-grained decisions by jointly observing wireless states and linguistic complexity, which are then refined via Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) to produce high-resolution, task- and channel-adaptive rank vectors. The two modules are optimized alternatively, with the DDIM trained under the Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) paradigm to maintain alignment with PPO rewards. Experiments under varying signal-to-noise ratios demonstrate that AirLLM consistently enhances fine-tuning performance while significantly reducing transmission costs, highlighting the effectiveness of reinforcement-driven, diffusion-refined rank adaptation for scalable and efficient remote fine-tuning over the air.

arXiv

Distinct Profiles of Run-to-Run Score Reliability and Expert-Panel Alignment Across Four LLM Evaluators of Simulated Japanese-Language AI-to-AI Counseling

Keita Kiuchi, Yoshikazu Fujimoto, Hideyuki Gotō, Tomonori Hosokawa, Makoto Nishimura, Yōsuke Satō, Izumi Sezai, Tomohiro INOUE

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly evaluate generated dialogue, but repeatable scores do not necessarily align with professional judgment. This observational fixed-benchmark study compared four configured LLM evaluator systems (GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Claude Opus 4.8, and Fable 5) with aggregated ratings from 15 counseling experts on 18 complete simulated AI-to-AI counseling sessions conducted in Japanese. The sessions represented three counselor conditions across six prespecified client profiles. Each system scored every transcript three times on four motivational interviewing-informed dimensions and overall quality. All four systems assigned higher scores than the expert panel for softening sustain talk and overall quality, although differences varied across systems and constructs. Single-run intraclass correlation coefficients ranged from .33 to .96, showing that high run-to-run reliability did not ensure closer expert-panel alignment. Claude Opus 4.8 had the smallest mean absolute difference, whereas Fable 5 had an intermediate difference. In a secondary benchmark analysis, GPT-4-turbo sessions generated with the Structured Multi-step Dialogue Prompt received higher expert ratings than sessions generated by the same model with a minimal instruction for cultivating change talk, partnership, empathy, and overall quality; the softening sustain talk contrast remained uncertain. The fixed benchmark contained one session per counselor-condition-by-profile cell, so inference concerns these sessions rather than all possible stochastic regenerations. Run-to-run reliability, expert-panel alignment, and condition discrimination are separate properties of automated counseling evaluation. This benchmark supports construct-level assessment of LLM evaluators against professional judgment.

arXiv

From Accuracy to Robustness: A Study of Rule- and Model-based Verifiers in Mathematical Reasoning

Yuzhen Huang, Weihao Zeng, Xingshan Zeng, Qi Zhu, Junxian He

Trustworthy verifiers are essential for the success of reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR), which is the core methodology behind various large reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1. In complex domains like mathematical reasoning, rule-based verifiers have been widely adopted in previous works to train strong reasoning models. However, the reliability of these verifiers and their impact on the RL training process remain poorly understood. In this work, we take mathematical reasoning as a case study and conduct a comprehensive analysis of various verifiers in both static evaluation and RL training scenarios. We show that widely used rule-based verifiers fail to recognize equivalent answers in different formats, leading to substantial false negatives that increasingly hinder RL performance as the policy model gets stronger. Model-based verifiers substantially improve static accuracy but are highly susceptible to reward hacking during RL, where they misclassify certain patterns in responses as correct, particularly after fine-tuning. Our findings underscore the challenges inherent to both rule- and model-based verifiers and provide insights toward developing more accurate and robust reward systems for reinforcement learning.

arXiv

Legal Rule Induction: Towards Generalizable Principle Discovery from Analogous Judicial Precedents

Wei Fan, Tianshi Zheng, Yiran HU, Zheye Deng, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Chunyang Li, Haoran Li, Weixing Shen, Yangqiu Song

Legal rules encompass not only codified statutes but also implicit adjudicatory principles derived from precedents that contain discretionary norms, social morality, and policy. While computational legal research has advanced in applying established rules to cases, inducing legal rules from judicial decisions remains understudied across jurisdictions. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers unprecedented potential to automate the extraction of such latent principles, yet progress is stymied by the absence of formal task definitions and benchmarks. To address this gap, we formalize Legal Rule Induction (LRI) as the task of deriving concise, generalizable doctrinal rules from analogous precedents, distilling their shared preconditions, normative behaviors, and legal consequences. We further propose a reproducible pipeline for LRI dataset construction and, instantiating it on Chinese law as a representative jurisdiction, introduce the first LRI benchmark comprising 5,121 case sets (38,088 court cases) for model tuning and 216 expert-annotated gold test sets. Experimental results reveal that: 1) State-of-the-art LLMs struggle with over-generalization and hallucination; 2) Training on our dataset markedly enhances LLMs capabilities in capturing nuanced rule patterns across similar cases.

arXiv

Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Dense Retrieval with Query Likelihood Modeling

Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Xiaojie Sun, Shihao Liu, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng

Dense retrieval is a crucial task in Information Retrieval (IR), serving as the basis for downstream tasks such as re-ranking and augmenting generation. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive semantic understanding capabilities, making them attractive to researchers focusing on dense retrieval. While LLMs, as decoder-style generative models, excel in language generation, they often fall short in modeling global information due to a lack of attention to subsequent tokens. Drawing inspiration from the classical word-based language modeling approach for IR, specifically the query likelihood (QL) model, we aim to leverage the generative strengths of LLMs through QL maximization. Rather than employing QL estimation for document ranking, we propose an auxiliary task of QL maximization to enhance the backbone for subsequent contrastive learning of the retriever. We introduce our model, LLM-QL, which incorporates two key components: Attention Block (AB) and Document Corruption (DC). AB blocks the attention of predictive tokens to the document tokens before the document's ending token, while DC corrupts a document by masking a portion of its tokens during prediction. Evaluations on the in-domain (MS MARCO) and out-of-domain dataset (BEIR) indicate LLM-QL's superiority over other LLM-based retrievers. Furthermore, comprehensive analyses also validate the efficacy of LLM-QL and its components.

arXiv

The BS-meter: Detecting Politics and Labour through ChatGPT's Language

Alessandro Trevisan, Harry Giddens, Sarah Dillon, Alan F. Blackwell

What can we learn about language from studying how it is used by ChatGPT and other large language model (LLM)-based chatbots? In this paper, we analyse the distinctive character of language generated by ChatGPT, in relation to questions raised by natural language processing pioneer, and student of Wittgenstein, Margaret Masterman. Following frequent complaints that LLM-based chatbots produce "bullshit," in the sense of Frankfurt's popular monograph On Bullshit, we conduct an empirical study to contrast the language of 1,000 scientific publications with typical text generated by ChatGPT. We then explore whether the same language features can be detected in two well-known contexts of social dysfunction: George Orwell's critique of political speech, and David Graeber's characterisation of bullshit jobs. Using simple hypothesis-testing methods, we demonstrate that a statistical model of bullshit can reliably relate the Frankfurtian artificial bullshit of ChatGPT to the political and workplace functions of bullshit as observed in natural human language.

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