Recent advances in large language models have enabled the development of viable generative information retrieval systems. A generative retrieval system returns a grounded generated text in response to an information need instead of the traditional document ranking. Quantifying the utility of these types of responses is essential for evaluating generative retrieval systems. As the established evaluation methodology for ranking-based ad hoc retrieval may seem unsuitable for generative retrieval, new approaches for reliable, repeatable, and reproducible experimentation are required. In this paper, we survey the relevant information retrieval and natural language processing literature, identify search tasks and system architectures in generative retrieval, develop a corresponding user model, and study its operationalization. This theoretical analysis provides a foundation and new insights for the evaluation of generative ad hoc retrieval systems.

Although voice conversion (VC) systems have shown a remarkable ability to transfer voice style, existing methods still have an inaccurate pitch and low speaker adaptation quality. To address these challenges, we introduce Diff-HierVC, a hierarchical VC system based on two diffusion models. We first introduce DiffPitch, which can effectively generate F0 with the target voice style. Subsequently, the generated F0 is fed to DiffVoice to convert the speech with a target voice style. Furthermore, using the source-filter encoder, we disentangle the speech and use the converted Mel-spectrogram as a data-driven prior in DiffVoice to improve the voice style transfer capacity. Finally, by using the masked prior in diffusion models, our model can improve the speaker adaptation quality. Experimental results verify the superiority of our model in pitch generation and voice style transfer performance, and our model also achieves a CER of 0.83% and EER of 3.29% in zero-shot VC scenarios.

Generalized quantifiers (e.g., few, most) are used to indicate the proportions predicates are satisfied (for example, some apples are red). One way to interpret quantifier semantics is to explicitly bind these satisfactions with percentage scopes (e.g., 30%-40% of apples are red). This approach can be helpful for tasks like logic formalization and surface-form quantitative reasoning (Gordon and Schubert, 2010; Roy et al., 2015). However, it remains unclear if recent foundation models possess this ability, as they lack direct training signals. To explore this, we introduce QuRe, a crowd-sourced dataset of human-annotated generalized quantifiers in Wikipedia sentences featuring percentage-equipped predicates. We explore quantifier comprehension in language models using PRESQUE, a framework that combines natural language inference and the Rational Speech Acts framework. Experimental results on the HVD dataset and QuRe illustrate that PRESQUE, employing pragmatic reasoning, performs 20% better than a literal reasoning baseline when predicting quantifier percentage scopes, with no additional training required.

Multiple-choice tests are a common approach for assessing candidates' comprehension skills. Standard multiple-choice reading comprehension exams require candidates to select the correct answer option from a discrete set based on a question in relation to a contextual passage. For appropriate assessment, the distractor answer options must by definition be incorrect but plausible and diverse. However, generating good quality distractors satisfying these criteria is a challenging task for content creators. We propose automated assessment metrics for the quality of distractors in multiple-choice reading comprehension tests. Specifically, we define quality in terms of the incorrectness, plausibility and diversity of the distractor options. We assess incorrectness using the classification ability of a binary multiple-choice reading comprehension system. Plausibility is assessed by considering the distractor confidence - the probability mass associated with the distractor options for a standard multi-class multiple-choice reading comprehension system. Diversity is assessed by pairwise comparison of an embedding-based equivalence metric between the distractors of a question. To further validate the plausibility metric we compare against candidate distributions over multiple-choice questions and agreement with a ChatGPT model's interpretation of distractor plausibility and diversity.

Data collection from manual labeling provides domain-specific and task-aligned supervision for data-driven approaches, and a critical mass of well-annotated resources is required to achieve reasonable performance in natural language processing tasks. However, manual annotations are often challenging to scale up in terms of time and budget, especially when domain knowledge, capturing subtle semantic features, and reasoning steps are needed. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of leveraging large language models on automated labeling for computational stance detection. We empirically observe that while large language models show strong potential as an alternative to human annotators, their sensitivity to task-specific instructions and their intrinsic biases pose intriguing yet unique challenges in machine annotation. We introduce a multi-label and multi-target sampling strategy to optimize the annotation quality. Experimental results on the benchmark stance detection corpora show that our method can significantly improve performance and learning efficacy.

In the last years, several variants of transformers have emerged. In this paper, we compare different transformer-based models for solving the reverse dictionary task and explore their use in the context of a serious game called The Dictionary Game.

Generalizable articulated object manipulation is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent efforts focus on imitation learning from demonstrations or reinforcement learning in simulation, however, due to the prohibitive costs of real-world data collection and precise object simulation, it still remains challenging for these works to achieve broad adaptability across diverse articulated objects. Recently, many works have tried to utilize the strong in-context learning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve generalizable robotic manipulation, but most of these researches focus on high-level task planning, sidelining low-level robotic control. In this work, building on the idea that the kinematic structure of the object determines how we can manipulate it, we propose a kinematic-aware prompting framework that prompts LLMs with kinematic knowledge of objects to generate low-level motion trajectory waypoints, supporting various object manipulation. To effectively prompt LLMs with the kinematic structure of different objects, we design a unified kinematic knowledge parser, which represents various articulated objects as a unified textual description containing kinematic joints and contact location. Building upon this unified description, a kinematic-aware planner model is proposed to generate precise 3D manipulation waypoints via a designed kinematic-aware chain-of-thoughts prompting method. Our evaluation spanned 48 instances across 16 distinct categories, revealing that our framework not only outperforms traditional methods on 8 seen categories but also shows a powerful zero-shot capability for 8 unseen articulated object categories. Moreover, the real-world experiments on 7 different object categories prove our framework's adaptability in practical scenarios. Code is released at \href{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/LLM_articulated_object_manipulation/tree/main}{here}.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a key technique for developing Medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that leverage Electronic Health Record (EHR) data to build diagnostic and prognostic models. NLP enables the conversion of unstructured clinical text into structured data that can be fed into AI algorithms. The emergence of the transformer architecture and large language models (LLMs) has led to remarkable advances in NLP for various healthcare tasks, such as entity recognition, relation extraction, sentence similarity, text summarization, and question answering. In this article, we review the major technical innovations that underpin modern NLP models and present state-of-the-art NLP applications that employ LLMs in radiation oncology research. However, these LLMs are prone to many errors such as hallucinations, biases, and ethical violations, which necessitate rigorous evaluation and validation before clinical deployment. As such, we propose a comprehensive framework for assessing the NLP models based on their purpose and clinical fit, technical performance, bias and trust, legal and ethical implications, and quality assurance, prior to implementation in clinical radiation oncology. Our article aims to provide guidance and insights for researchers and clinicians who are interested in developing and using NLP models in clinical radiation oncology.

We propose a self-correction mechanism for Large Language Models (LLMs) to mitigate issues such as toxicity and fact hallucination. This method involves refining model outputs through an ensemble of critics and the model's own feedback. Drawing inspiration from human behavior, we explore whether LLMs can emulate the self-correction process observed in humans who often engage in self-reflection and seek input from others to refine their understanding of complex topics. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be applied across various domains to enhance trustworthiness by addressing fairness, bias, and robustness concerns. We consistently observe performance improvements in LLMs for reducing toxicity and correcting factual errors.

In this paper, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) Agents in playing the strategic social deduction game, Resistance Avalon. Players in Avalon are challenged not only to make informed decisions based on dynamically evolving game phases, but also to engage in discussions where they must deceive, deduce, and negotiate with other players. These characteristics make Avalon a compelling test-bed to study the decision-making and language-processing capabilities of LLM Agents. To facilitate research in this line, we introduce AvalonBench - a comprehensive game environment tailored for evaluating multi-agent LLM Agents. This benchmark incorporates: (1) a game environment for Avalon, (2) rule-based bots as baseline opponents, and (3) ReAct-style LLM agents with tailored prompts for each role. Notably, our evaluations based on AvalonBench highlight a clear capability gap. For instance, models like ChatGPT playing good-role got a win rate of 22.2% against rule-based bots playing evil, while good-role bot achieves 38.2% win rate in the same setting. We envision AvalonBench could be a good test-bed for developing more advanced LLMs (with self-playing) and agent frameworks that can effectively model the layered complexities of such game environments.