Since the introduction of ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant utility in various tasks, such as answering questions through retrieval-augmented generation. Context can be retrieved using a vectorized database, serving as a foundation for LLMs to generate responses. However, hallucinations in responses can undermine the reliability of LLMs in practical applications, and they are not easily detectable in the absence of ground truth, particularly in question-and-answer scenarios. This paper proposes a framework that integrates multiple small language models to verify responses generated by LLMs using the retrieved context from a vectorized database. By breaking down the responses into individual sentences and utilizing the probability of generating "Yes" tokens from the outputs of multiple models for a given set of questions, responses, and relevant context, hallucinations can be detected. The proposed framework is validated through experiments with real datasets comprising over 100 sets of questions, answers, and contexts, including responses with fully and partially correct sentences. The results demonstrate a 10\% improvement in F1 scores for detecting correct responses compared to hallucinations, indicating that multiple small language models can be effectively employed for answer verification, providing a scalable and efficient solution for both academic and practical applications.

Understanding time from visual representations is a fundamental cognitive skill, yet it remains a challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In this work, we investigate the capabilities of MLLMs in interpreting time and date through analogue clocks and yearly calendars. To facilitate this, we curated a structured dataset comprising two subsets: 1) $\textit{ClockQA}$, which comprises various types of clock styles$-$standard, black-dial, no-second-hand, Roman numeral, and arrow-hand clocks$-$paired with time related questions; and 2) $\textit{CalendarQA}$, which consists of yearly calendar images with questions ranging from commonly known dates (e.g., Christmas, New Year's Day) to computationally derived ones (e.g., the 100th or 153rd day of the year). We aim to analyse how MLLMs can perform visual recognition, numerical reasoning, and temporal inference when presented with time-related visual data. Our evaluations show that despite recent advancements, reliably understanding time remains a significant challenge for MLLMs.

While Large Language Models show remarkable performance in natural language understanding, their resource-intensive nature makes them less accessible. In contrast, smaller language models such as MiniCPM offer more sustainable scalability, but often underperform without specialized optimization. In this paper, we explore the enhancement of smaller language models through the improvement of their text embeddings. We select three language models, MiniCPM, Phi-2, and Gemma, to conduct contrastive fine-tuning on the NLI dataset. Our results demonstrate that this fine-tuning method enhances the quality of text embeddings for all three models across various benchmarks, with MiniCPM showing the most significant improvements of an average 56.33% performance gain. The contrastive fine-tuning code is publicly available at https://github.com/trapoom555/Language-Model-STS-CFT.