This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results while requiring little or no direct supervision. Further, there is mounting evidence that LLMs may have potential in information-seeking scenarios. We believe the ability of an LLM to attribute the text that it generates is likely to be crucial in this setting. We formulate and study Attributed QA as a key first step in the development of attributed LLMs. We propose a reproducible evaluation framework for the task and benchmark a broad set of architectures. We take human annotations as a gold standard and show that a correlated automatic metric is suitable for development. Our experimental work gives concrete answers to two key questions (How to measure attribution?, and How well do current state-of-the-art methods perform on attribution?), and give some hints as to how to address a third (How to build LLMs with attribution?).

Large language models, often trained with billions of parameters, have achieved impressive performance in recent years (Raffel et al., 2019) and are used in a wide variety of natural language generation tasks. However, their output is sometimes undesirable, with hallucinated content (Maynez et al., 2020; Filippova, 2020), and much work remains to fully understand their properties. In many applications, such as healthcare, question-answering systems, or customer service, incorrect predictions are particularly costly and must be avoided. This motivates the design of algorithms for large language models and other NLP tasks that achieve high precision on a large fraction of the input set, while abstaining on the rest. How can we devise such accurate models that allow a reject option?

A question answering system that in addition to providing an answer provides an explanation of the reasoning that leads to that answer has potential advantages in terms of debuggability, extensibility and trust. To this end, we propose QED, a linguistically informed, extensible framework for explanations in question answering. A QED explanation specifies the relationship between a question and answer according to formal semantic notions such as referential equality, sentencehood, and entailment. We describe and publicly release an expert-annotated dataset of QED explanations built upon a subset of the Google Natural Questions dataset, and report baseline models on two tasks -- post-hoc explanation generation given an answer, and joint question answering and explanation generation. In the joint setting, a promising result suggests that training on a relatively small amount of QED data can improve question answering. In addition to describing the formal, language-theoretic motivations for the QED approach, we describe a large user study showing that the presence of QED explanations significantly improves the ability of untrained raters to spot errors made by a strong neural QA baseline.

In this work we present Google's submission to the BioASQ 7 biomedical question answering (QA) task (specifically Task 7b, Phase B). The core of our systems are based on BERT QA models, specifically the model of \cite{alberti2019bert}. In this report, and via our submissions, we aimed to investigate two research questions. We start by studying how domain portable are QA systems that have been pre-trained and fine-tuned on general texts, e.g., Wikipedia. We measure this via two submissions. The first is a non-adapted model that uses a public pre-trained BERT model and is fine-tuned on the Natural Questions data set \cite{kwiatkowski2019natural}. The second system takes this non-adapted model and fine-tunes it with the BioASQ training data. Next, we study the impact of error propagation in end-to-end retrieval and QA systems. Again we test this via two submissions. The first uses human annotated relevant documents and snippets as input to the model and the second predicted documents and snippets. Our main findings are that domain specific fine-tuning can benefit Biomedical QA. However, the biggest quality bottleneck is at the retrieval stage, where we see large drops in metrics -- over 10pts absolute -- when using non gold inputs to the QA model.