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Oct 26

TMUAD: Enhancing Logical Capabilities in Unified Anomaly Detection Models with a Text Memory Bank

Anomaly detection, which aims to identify anomalies deviating from normal patterns, is challenging due to the limited amount of normal data available. Unlike most existing unified methods that rely on carefully designed image feature extractors and memory banks to capture logical relationships between objects, we introduce a text memory bank to enhance the detection of logical anomalies. Specifically, we propose a Three-Memory framework for Unified structural and logical Anomaly Detection (TMUAD). First, we build a class-level text memory bank for logical anomaly detection by the proposed logic-aware text extractor, which can capture rich logical descriptions of objects from input images. Second, we construct an object-level image memory bank that preserves complete object contours by extracting features from segmented objects. Third, we employ visual encoders to extract patch-level image features for constructing a patch-level memory bank for structural anomaly detection. These three complementary memory banks are used to retrieve and compare normal images that are most similar to the query image, compute anomaly scores at multiple levels, and fuse them into a final anomaly score. By unifying structural and logical anomaly detection through collaborative memory banks, TMUAD achieves state-of-the-art performance across seven publicly available datasets involving industrial and medical domains. The model and code are available at https://github.com/SIA-IDE/TMUAD.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 28, 2025

Scalable and Domain-General Abstractive Proposition Segmentation

Segmenting text into fine-grained units of meaning is important to a wide range of NLP applications. The default approach of segmenting text into sentences is often insufficient, especially since sentences are usually complex enough to include multiple units of meaning that merit separate treatment in the downstream task. We focus on the task of abstractive proposition segmentation: transforming text into simple, self-contained, well-formed sentences. Several recent works have demonstrated the utility of proposition segmentation with few-shot prompted LLMs for downstream tasks such as retrieval-augmented grounding and fact verification. However, this approach does not scale to large amounts of text and may not always extract all the facts from the input text. In this paper, we first introduce evaluation metrics for the task to measure several dimensions of quality. We then propose a scalable, yet accurate, proposition segmentation model. We model proposition segmentation as a supervised task by training LLMs on existing annotated datasets and show that training yields significantly improved results. We further show that by using the fine-tuned LLMs as teachers for annotating large amounts of multi-domain synthetic distillation data, we can train smaller student models with results similar to the teacher LLMs. We then demonstrate that our technique leads to effective domain generalization, by annotating data in two domains outside the original training data and evaluating on them. Finally, as a key contribution of the paper, we share an easy-to-use API for NLP practitioners to use.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 28, 2024

IdiomX A Multilingual Benchmark for Idiom Understanding, Retrieval, and Interpretation

Idiomatic expressions remain a persistent challenge for natural language processing because their meanings are often non-compositional, context-dependent, and difficult to align across languages. Existing idiom resources are often limited in scale, contextual diversity, or multilingual coverage, restricting their utility for modern language models. We introduce IdiomX, a large-scale multilingual benchmark for idiom understanding, retrieval, and interpretation, constructed through a reproducible multi-stage pipeline combining lexical resource extraction, large-scale normalization, controlled large language model enrichment, and structured validation. The resulting dataset contains over 190K contextualized examples spanning 12K+ idioms, with aligned English, Arabic, and French semantic representations, idiomatic and literal usage labels, and rich linguistic metadata. Building on this resource, we define a unified four-task benchmark covering idiom detection, context-to-idiom retrieval, Arabic-to-English idiom retrieval, and idiom interpretation, extending evaluation from figurative recognition to semantic grounding and explainable meaning retrieval. Experiments show that contextual transformer models substantially improve idiom detection, while hybrid retrieval and reranking architectures significantly strengthen both monolingual and cross-lingual idiom retrieval. Results further demonstrate that idiom interpretation can be effectively modeled as a semantic retrieval task, introducing interpretability as a complementary benchmark dimension. Overall, IdiomX provides a scalable benchmark for studying idiomatic language as a progression from detection to retrieval and semantic interpretation, and offers a modular framework extensible to additional languages and figurative reasoning tasks

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 24

Legal2LogicICL: Improving Generalization in Transforming Legal Cases to Logical Formulas via Diverse Few-Shot Learning

This work aims to improve the generalization of logic-based legal reasoning systems by integrating recent advances in NLP with legal-domain adaptive few-shot learning techniques using LLMs. Existing logic-based legal reasoning pipelines typically rely on fine-tuned models to map natural-language legal cases into logical formulas before forwarding them to a symbolic reasoner. However, such approaches are heavily constrained by the scarcity of high-quality annotated training data. To address this limitation, we propose a novel LLM-based legal reasoning framework that enables effective in-context learning through retrieval-augmented generation. Specifically, we introduce Legal2LogicICL, a few-shot retrieval framework that balances diversity and similarity of exemplars at both the latent semantic representation level and the legal text structure level. In addition, our method explicitly accounts for legal structure by mitigating entity-induced retrieval bias in legal texts, where lengthy and highly specific entity mentions often dominate semantic representations and obscure legally meaningful reasoning patterns. Our Legal2LogicICL constructs informative and robust few-shot demonstrations, leading to accurate and stable logical rule generation without requiring additional training. In addition, we construct a new dataset, named Legal2Proleg, which is annotated with alignments between legal cases and PROLEG logical formulas to support the evaluation of legal semantic parsing. Experimental results on both open-source and proprietary LLMs demonstrate that our approach significantly improves accuracy, stability, and generalization in transforming natural-language legal case descriptions into logical representations, highlighting its effectiveness for interpretable and reliable legal reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/yingjie7/Legal2LogicICL.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 12

PIKE-RAG: sPecIalized KnowledgE and Rationale Augmented Generation

Despite notable advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that expand large language model (LLM) capabilities through external retrieval, these systems often struggle to meet the complex and diverse needs of real-world industrial applications. The reliance on retrieval alone proves insufficient for extracting deep, domain-specific knowledge performing in logical reasoning from specialized corpora. To address this, we introduce sPecIalized KnowledgE and Rationale Augmentation Generation (PIKE-RAG), focusing on extracting, understanding, and applying specialized knowledge, while constructing coherent rationale to incrementally steer LLMs toward accurate responses. Recognizing the diverse challenges of industrial tasks, we introduce a new paradigm that classifies tasks based on their complexity in knowledge extraction and application, allowing for a systematic evaluation of RAG systems' problem-solving capabilities. This strategic approach offers a roadmap for the phased development and enhancement of RAG systems, tailored to meet the evolving demands of industrial applications. Furthermore, we propose knowledge atomizing and knowledge-aware task decomposition to effectively extract multifaceted knowledge from the data chunks and iteratively construct the rationale based on original query and the accumulated knowledge, respectively, showcasing exceptional performance across various benchmarks.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 20, 2025

Socrates or Smartypants: Testing Logic Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models with Logic Programming-based Test Oracles

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress in language understanding and reasoning. Evaluating and analyzing their logical reasoning abilities has therefore become essential. However, existing datasets and benchmarks are often limited to overly simplistic, unnatural, or contextually constrained examples. In response to the growing demand, we introduce SmartyPat-Bench, a challenging, naturally expressed, and systematically labeled benchmark derived from real-world high-quality Reddit posts containing subtle logical fallacies. Unlike existing datasets and benchmarks, it provides more detailed annotations of logical fallacies and features more diverse data. To further scale up the study and address the limitations of manual data collection and labeling - such as fallacy-type imbalance and labor-intensive annotation - we introduce SmartyPat, an automated framework powered by logic programming-based oracles. SmartyPat utilizes Prolog rules to systematically generate logically fallacious statements, which are then refined into fluent natural-language sentences by LLMs, ensuring precise fallacy representation. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that SmartyPat produces fallacies comparable in subtlety and quality to human-generated content and significantly outperforms baseline methods. Finally, experiments reveal nuanced insights into LLM capabilities, highlighting that while excessive reasoning steps hinder fallacy detection accuracy, structured reasoning enhances fallacy categorization performance.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 9, 2025

Semantic Operators: A Declarative Model for Rich, AI-based Data Processing

The semantic capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enable rich analytics and reasoning over vast knowledge corpora. Unfortunately, existing systems either empirically optimize expensive LLM-powered operations with no performance guarantees, or serve a limited set of row-wise LLM operations, providing limited robustness, expressiveness and usability. We introduce semantic operators, the first formalism for declarative and general-purpose AI-based transformations based on natural language specifications (e.g., filtering, sorting, joining or aggregating records using natural language criteria). Each operator opens a rich space for execution plans, similar to relational operators. Our model specifies the expected behavior of each operator with a high-quality gold algorithm, and we develop an optimization framework that reduces cost, while providing accuracy guarantees with respect to a gold algorithm. Using this approach, we propose several novel optimizations to accelerate semantic filtering, joining, group-by and top-k operations by up to 1,000times. We implement semantic operators in the LOTUS system and demonstrate LOTUS' effectiveness on real, bulk-semantic processing applications, including fact-checking, biomedical multi-label classification, search, and topic analysis. We show that the semantic operator model is expressive, capturing state-of-the-art AI pipelines in a few operator calls, and making it easy to express new pipelines that match or exceed quality of recent LLM-based analytic systems by up to 170%, while offering accuracy guarantees. Overall, LOTUS programs match or exceed the accuracy of state-of-the-art AI pipelines for each task while running up to 3.6times faster than the highest-quality baselines. LOTUS is publicly available at https://github.com/lotus-data/lotus.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 16, 2024

Less is More: Compact Clue Selection for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation Reasoning

Current RAG retrievers are designed primarily for human readers, emphasizing complete, readable, and coherent paragraphs. However, Large Language Models (LLMs) benefit more from precise, compact, and well-structured input, which enhances reasoning quality and efficiency. Existing methods rely on reranking or summarization to identify key sentences, but may introduce semantic breaks and unfaithfulness. Thus, efficiently extracting and organizing answer-relevant clues from large-scale documents while reducing LLM reasoning costs remains challenging in RAG systems. Inspired by Occam's razor, we frame LLM-centric retrieval as MinMax optimization: maximizing the extraction of potential clues and reranking them for well-organization, while minimizing reasoning costs by truncating to the smallest sufficient set of clues. In this paper, we propose CompSelect, a compact clue selection mechanism for LLM-centric RAG, consisting of a clue extractor, a reranker, and a truncator. (1) The clue extractor first uses answer-containing sentences as fine-tuning targets, aiming to extract sufficient potential clues; (2) The reranker is trained to prioritize effective clues based on real LLM feedback; (3) The truncator uses the truncated text containing the minimum sufficient clues for answering the question as fine-tuning targets, thereby enabling efficient RAG reasoning. Experiments on three QA datasets demonstrate that CompSelect improves performance while reducing both total and online latency compared to a range of baseline methods. Further analysis also confirms its robustness to unreliable retrieval and generalization across different scenarios.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 26

Relation Extraction with Fine-Tuned Large Language Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation Frameworks

Information Extraction (IE) is crucial for converting unstructured data into structured formats like Knowledge Graphs (KGs). A key task within IE is Relation Extraction (RE), which identifies relationships between entities in text. Various RE methods exist, including supervised, unsupervised, weakly supervised, and rule-based approaches. Recent studies leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown significant success in this area. In the current era dominated by Large Language Models (LLMs), fine-tuning these models can overcome limitations associated with zero-shot LLM prompting-based RE methods, especially regarding domain adaptation challenges and identifying implicit relations between entities in sentences. These implicit relations, which cannot be easily extracted from a sentence's dependency tree, require logical inference for accurate identification. This work explores the performance of fine-tuned LLMs and their integration into the Retrieval Augmented-based (RAG) RE approach to address the challenges of identifying implicit relations at the sentence level, particularly when LLMs act as generators within the RAG framework. Empirical evaluations on the TACRED, TACRED-Revisited (TACREV), Re-TACRED, and SemEVAL datasets show significant performance improvements with fine-tuned LLMs, including Llama2-7B, Mistral-7B, and T5 (Large). Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains on SemEVAL, where implicit relations are common, surpassing previous results on this dataset. Additionally, our method outperforms previous works on TACRED, TACREV, and Re-TACRED, demonstrating exceptional performance across diverse evaluation scenarios.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 20, 2024

ReLiK: Retrieve and LinK, Fast and Accurate Entity Linking and Relation Extraction on an Academic Budget

Entity Linking (EL) and Relation Extraction (RE) are fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing, serving as critical components in a wide range of applications. In this paper, we propose ReLiK, a Retriever-Reader architecture for both EL and RE, where, given an input text, the Retriever module undertakes the identification of candidate entities or relations that could potentially appear within the text. Subsequently, the Reader module is tasked to discern the pertinent retrieved entities or relations and establish their alignment with the corresponding textual spans. Notably, we put forward an innovative input representation that incorporates the candidate entities or relations alongside the text, making it possible to link entities or extract relations in a single forward pass and to fully leverage pre-trained language models contextualization capabilities, in contrast with previous Retriever-Reader-based methods, which require a forward pass for each candidate. Our formulation of EL and RE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks while using academic budget training and with up to 40x inference speed compared to competitors. Finally, we show how our architecture can be used seamlessly for Information Extraction (cIE), i.e. EL + RE, and setting a new state of the art by employing a shared Reader that simultaneously extracts entities and relations.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 31, 2024 2

Segment Any Text: A Universal Approach for Robust, Efficient and Adaptable Sentence Segmentation

Segmenting text into sentences plays an early and crucial role in many NLP systems. This is commonly achieved by using rule-based or statistical methods relying on lexical features such as punctuation. Although some recent works no longer exclusively rely on punctuation, we find that no prior method achieves all of (i) robustness to missing punctuation, (ii) effective adaptability to new domains, and (iii) high efficiency. We introduce a new model - Segment any Text (SaT) - to solve this problem. To enhance robustness, we propose a new pretraining scheme that ensures less reliance on punctuation. To address adaptability, we introduce an extra stage of parameter-efficient fine-tuning, establishing state-of-the-art performance in distinct domains such as verses from lyrics and legal documents. Along the way, we introduce architectural modifications that result in a threefold gain in speed over the previous state of the art and solve spurious reliance on context far in the future. Finally, we introduce a variant of our model with fine-tuning on a diverse, multilingual mixture of sentence-segmented data, acting as a drop-in replacement and enhancement for existing segmentation tools. Overall, our contributions provide a universal approach for segmenting any text. Our method outperforms all baselines - including strong LLMs - across 8 corpora spanning diverse domains and languages, especially in practically relevant situations where text is poorly formatted. Our models and code, including documentation, are available at https://huggingface.co/segment-any-text under the MIT license.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024 3

STRUCTSENSE: A Task-Agnostic Agentic Framework for Structured Information Extraction with Human-In-The-Loop Evaluation and Benchmarking

The ability to extract structured information from unstructured sources-such as free-text documents and scientific literature-is critical for accelerating scientific discovery and knowledge synthesis. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various natural language processing tasks, including structured information extraction. However, their effectiveness often diminishes in specialized, domain-specific contexts that require nuanced understanding and expert-level domain knowledge. In addition, existing LLM-based approaches frequently exhibit poor transferability across tasks and domains, limiting their scalability and adaptability. To address these challenges, we introduce StructSense, a modular, task-agnostic, open-source framework for structured information extraction built on LLMs. StructSense is guided by domain-specific symbolic knowledge encoded in ontologies, enabling it to navigate complex domain content more effectively. It further incorporates agentic capabilities through self-evaluative judges that form a feedback loop for iterative refinement, and includes human-in-the-loop mechanisms to ensure quality and validation. We demonstrate that StructSense can overcome both the limitations of domain sensitivity and the lack of cross-task generalizability, as shown through its application to diverse neuroscience information extraction tasks.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025

Dripper: Token-Efficient Main HTML Extraction with a Lightweight LM

High-quality main content extraction from web pages is a critical prerequisite for constructing large-scale training corpora. While traditional heuristic extractors are efficient, they lack the semantic reasoning required to handle the structural heterogeneity of the modern web. Conversely, well-pretrained generative Large Language Models (LLMs) offer superior document comprehension but are prohibited by excessive computational costs, limited context windows, and hallucination risks when applied at web scale. We present Dripper, a lightweight framework that resolves these bottlenecks through four contributions: (1) We reformulate extraction as a constrained sequence labeling task using SLMs (Small Language Models). This paradigm eliminates generative hallucinations and achieves exceptional efficiency, reaching a throughput of 3.08 pages per second on a single A100 GPU. (2) We construct WebMainBench, a rigorous benchmark of 7,809 human-annotated pages covering 5,434 unique domains and multiple languages. Evaluations show our Dripper-0.6B model outperforms heuristics like Trafilatura and rivals massive models like DeepSeek-V3.2(685B), GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Pro, offering an optimal efficiency-accuracy trade-off. (3) We demonstrate infrastructural value by pre-training a 1B model on a Dripper-curated corpus (63B tokens). This model significantly outperforms baselines in downstream tasks, proving the critical role of extraction quality and the effectiveness of our framework. (4) We open-source the Dripper-0.6B weights and codebase to facilitate the construction of high-quality datasets.

  • 17 authors
·
Nov 28, 2025 1

Multi-hop Question Answering via Reasoning Chains

Multi-hop question answering requires models to gather information from different parts of a text to answer a question. Most current approaches learn to address this task in an end-to-end way with neural networks, without maintaining an explicit representation of the reasoning process. We propose a method to extract a discrete reasoning chain over the text, which consists of a series of sentences leading to the answer. We then feed the extracted chains to a BERT-based QA model to do final answer prediction. Critically, we do not rely on gold annotated chains or "supporting facts:" at training time, we derive pseudogold reasoning chains using heuristics based on named entity recognition and coreference resolution. Nor do we rely on these annotations at test time, as our model learns to extract chains from raw text alone. We test our approach on two recently proposed large multi-hop question answering datasets: WikiHop and HotpotQA, and achieve state-of-art performance on WikiHop and strong performance on HotpotQA. Our analysis shows the properties of chains that are crucial for high performance: in particular, modeling extraction sequentially is important, as is dealing with each candidate sentence in a context-aware way. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that our extracted chains allow humans to give answers with high confidence, indicating that these are a strong intermediate abstraction for this task.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2019

P-FOLIO: Evaluating and Improving Logical Reasoning with Abundant Human-Written Reasoning Chains

Existing methods on understanding the capabilities of LLMs in logical reasoning rely on binary entailment classification or synthetically derived rationales, which are not sufficient for proper investigation of model's capabilities. We present P-FOLIO, a human-annotated dataset consisting of diverse and complex reasoning chains for a set of realistic logical reasoning stories also written by humans. P-FOLIO is collected with an annotation protocol that facilitates humans to annotate well-structured natural language proofs for first-order logic reasoning problems in a step-by-step manner. The number of reasoning steps in P-FOLIO span from 0 to 20. We further use P-FOLIO to evaluate and improve large-language-model (LLM) reasoning capabilities. We evaluate LLM reasoning capabilities at a fine granularity via single-step inference rule classification, with more diverse inference rules of more diverse and higher levels of complexities than previous works. Given that a single model-generated reasoning chain could take a completely different path than the human-annotated one, we sample multiple reasoning chains from a model and use pass@k metrics for evaluating the quality of model-generated reasoning chains. We show that human-written reasoning chains significantly boost the logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs via many-shot prompting and fine-tuning. Furthermore, fine-tuning Llama3-7B on P-FOLIO improves the model performance by 10% or more on three other out-of-domain logical reasoning datasets. We also conduct detailed analysis to show where most powerful LLMs fall short in reasoning. We will release the dataset and code publicly.

  • 16 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024

SCOPE and SCION: A Benchmark and an Auditable Reference Pipeline for Schema Induction and Fusion from Text

Schema graphs are an upstream bottleneck of schema-grounded information extraction and knowledge graph construction, yet most extraction systems assume the schema is already available. We introduce SCOPE (Schema Construction and Ontology-induction Pipeline Evaluation), a train-text-only benchmark for corpus-to-schema induction and optional schema fusion from raw text, built from 24 public information extraction sources (15 RE and 9 EE) normalized into evaluation-only gold schema graphs; its core event-extraction target covers event types and within-event argument roles, with inter-event links reported separately. We present SCION (Schema Construction and Induction with Ontology Normalization), an auditable reference pipeline rather than a new extraction architecture; it constructs candidate spaces from train text and restricts naming, merging, filtering, validation, and conservative fusion to candidate-linked evidence under strict JSON contracts. On the SCOPE core suite, SCION-lite attains the highest F1 among released source-schema references, Text2Onto-style, LLM-only, and matched extract-then-aggregate baselines under Literal, Fuzzy, Continuous, and Graph schema-graph metrics, while the compact open-model SCION-RL variant reduces reliance on proprietary LLM schema engineers. These results are reported against normalized typed-edge targets rather than as claims that induced schemas surpass human ontology design; the release includes evidence-linked outputs, parse/fallback logs, candidate retention/merging logs, run manifests, code, and benchmark packages at https://github.com/wandugu/paper_scion.

  • 8 authors
·
May 19

A Joint Model for Definition Extraction with Syntactic Connection and Semantic Consistency

Definition Extraction (DE) is one of the well-known topics in Information Extraction that aims to identify terms and their corresponding definitions in unstructured texts. This task can be formalized either as a sentence classification task (i.e., containing term-definition pairs or not) or a sequential labeling task (i.e., identifying the boundaries of the terms and definitions). The previous works for DE have only focused on one of the two approaches, failing to model the inter-dependencies between the two tasks. In this work, we propose a novel model for DE that simultaneously performs the two tasks in a single framework to benefit from their inter-dependencies. Our model features deep learning architectures to exploit the global structures of the input sentences as well as the semantic consistencies between the terms and the definitions, thereby improving the quality of the representation vectors for DE. Besides the joint inference between sentence classification and sequential labeling, the proposed model is fundamentally different from the prior work for DE in that the prior work has only employed the local structures of the input sentences (i.e., word-to-word relations), and not yet considered the semantic consistencies between terms and definitions. In order to implement these novel ideas, our model presents a multi-task learning framework that employs graph convolutional neural networks and predicts the dependency paths between the terms and the definitions. We also seek to enforce the consistency between the representations of the terms and definitions both globally (i.e., increasing semantic consistency between the representations of the entire sentences and the terms/definitions) and locally (i.e., promoting the similarity between the representations of the terms and the definitions).

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 5, 2019

In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search

Since large language models have approached human-level performance on many tasks, it has become increasingly harder for researchers to find tasks that are still challenging to the models. Failure cases usually come from the long-tail distribution - data that an oracle language model could assign a probability on the lower end of its distribution. Current methodology such as prompt engineering or crowdsourcing are insufficient for creating long-tail examples because humans are constrained by cognitive bias. We propose a Logic-Induced-Knowledge-Search (LINK) framework for systematically generating long-tail knowledge statements. Grounded by a symbolic rule, we search for long-tail values for each variable of the rule by first prompting a LLM, then verifying the correctness of the values with a critic, and lastly pushing for the long-tail distribution with a reranker. With this framework we construct a dataset, Logic-Induced-Long-Tail (LINT), consisting of 200 symbolic rules and 50K knowledge statements spanning across four domains. Human annotations find that 84% of the statements in LINT are factually correct. In contrast, ChatGPT and GPT4 struggle with directly generating long-tail statements under the guidance of logic rules, each only getting 56% and 78% of their statements correct. Moreover, their "long-tail" generations in fact fall into the higher likelihood range, and thus are not really long-tail. Our findings suggest that LINK is effective for generating data in the long-tail distribution while enforcing quality. LINT can be useful for systematically evaluating LLMs' capabilities in the long-tail distribution. We challenge the models with a simple entailment classification task using samples from LINT. We find that ChatGPT and GPT4's capability in identifying incorrect knowledge drop by ~3% in the long-tail distribution compared to head distribution.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 13, 2023

Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Practice: A Survey on ChatGPT and Beyond

This paper presents a comprehensive and practical guide for practitioners and end-users working with Large Language Models (LLMs) in their downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. We provide discussions and insights into the usage of LLMs from the perspectives of models, data, and downstream tasks. Firstly, we offer an introduction and brief summary of current GPT- and BERT-style LLMs. Then, we discuss the influence of pre-training data, training data, and test data. Most importantly, we provide a detailed discussion about the use and non-use cases of large language models for various natural language processing tasks, such as knowledge-intensive tasks, traditional natural language understanding tasks, natural language generation tasks, emergent abilities, and considerations for specific tasks.We present various use cases and non-use cases to illustrate the practical applications and limitations of LLMs in real-world scenarios. We also try to understand the importance of data and the specific challenges associated with each NLP task. Furthermore, we explore the impact of spurious biases on LLMs and delve into other essential considerations, such as efficiency, cost, and latency, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of deploying LLMs in practice. This comprehensive guide aims to provide researchers and practitioners with valuable insights and best practices for working with LLMs, thereby enabling the successful implementation of these models in a wide range of NLP tasks. A curated list of practical guide resources of LLMs, regularly updated, can be found at https://github.com/Mooler0410/LLMsPracticalGuide.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 26, 2023

ALR^2: A Retrieve-then-Reason Framework for Long-context Question Answering

The context window of large language models (LLMs) has been extended significantly in recent years. However, while the context length that the LLM can process has grown, the capability of the model to accurately reason over that context degrades noticeably. This occurs because modern LLMs often become overwhelmed by the vast amount of information in the context; when answering questions, the model must identify and reason over relevant evidence sparsely distributed throughout the text. To alleviate the challenge of long-context reasoning, we develop a retrieve-then-reason framework, enabling LLMs to reason over relevant evidence collected during an intermediate retrieval step. We find that modern LLMs struggle to accurately retrieve relevant facts and instead, often hallucinate "retrieved facts", resulting in flawed reasoning and the production of incorrect answers. To address these issues, we introduce ALR^2, a method that augments the long-context reasoning capability of LLMs via an explicit two-stage procedure, i.e., aligning LLMs with the objectives of both retrieval and reasoning. We demonstrate the efficacy of ALR^2 for mitigating performance degradation in long-context reasoning tasks. Through extensive experiments on long-context QA benchmarks, we find our method to outperform competitive baselines by large margins, achieving at least 8.4 and 7.9 EM gains on the long-context versions of HotpotQA and SQuAD datasets, respectively.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 4, 2024

SciLitLLM: How to Adapt LLMs for Scientific Literature Understanding

Scientific literature understanding is crucial for extracting targeted information and garnering insights, thereby significantly advancing scientific discovery. Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), they face challenges in scientific literature understanding, primarily due to (1) a lack of scientific knowledge and (2) unfamiliarity with specialized scientific tasks. To develop an LLM specialized in scientific literature understanding, we propose a hybrid strategy that integrates continual pre-training (CPT) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), to simultaneously infuse scientific domain knowledge and enhance instruction-following capabilities for domain-specific tasks.cIn this process, we identify two key challenges: (1) constructing high-quality CPT corpora, and (2) generating diverse SFT instructions. We address these challenges through a meticulous pipeline, including PDF text extraction, parsing content error correction, quality filtering, and synthetic instruction creation. Applying this strategy, we present a suite of LLMs: SciLitLLM, specialized in scientific literature understanding. These models demonstrate promising performance on scientific literature understanding benchmarks. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We present an effective framework that integrates CPT and SFT to adapt LLMs to scientific literature understanding, which can also be easily adapted to other domains. (2) We propose an LLM-based synthesis method to generate diverse and high-quality scientific instructions, resulting in a new instruction set -- SciLitIns -- for supervised fine-tuning in less-represented scientific domains. (3) SciLitLLM achieves promising performance improvements on scientific literature understanding benchmarks.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024 1

Logics-Parsing Technical Report

Recent advances in Large Vision-Language models (LVLM) have spurred significant progress in document parsing task. Compared to traditional pipeline-based methods, end-to-end paradigms have shown their excellence in converting PDF images into structured outputs through integrated Optical Character Recognition (OCR), table recognition, mathematical formula recognition and so on. However, the absence of explicit analytical stages for document layouts and reading orders limits the LVLM's capability in handling complex document types such as multi-column newspapers or posters. To address this limitation, we propose in this report Logics-Parsing: an end-to-end LVLM-based model augmented with reinforcement learning. Our model incorporates meticulously designed reward mechanisms to optimize complex layout analysis and reading order inference. In addition, we expand the model's versatility by incorporating diverse data types such as chemical formulas and handwritten Chinese characters into supervised fine-tuning. Finally, to enable rigorous evaluation of our approach, we introduce LogicsParsingBench, a curated set of 1,078 page-level PDF images spanning nine major categories and over twenty sub-categories, which will be released later. Comprehensive experiments conducted on LogicsParsingBench have validated the efficacy and State-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of our proposed model across diverse document analysis scenarios. Project Page: https://github.com/alibaba/Logics-Parsing

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 24, 2025 2

TACAM: Topic And Context Aware Argument Mining

In this work we address the problem of argument search. The purpose of argument search is the distillation of pro and contra arguments for requested topics from large text corpora. In previous works, the usual approach is to use a standard search engine to extract text parts which are relevant to the given topic and subsequently use an argument recognition algorithm to select arguments from them. The main challenge in the argument recognition task, which is also known as argument mining, is that often sentences containing arguments are structurally similar to purely informative sentences without any stance about the topic. In fact, they only differ semantically. Most approaches use topic or search term information only for the first search step and therefore assume that arguments can be classified independently of a topic. We argue that topic information is crucial for argument mining, since the topic defines the semantic context of an argument. Precisely, we propose different models for the classification of arguments, which take information about a topic of an argument into account. Moreover, to enrich the context of a topic and to let models understand the context of the potential argument better, we integrate information from different external sources such as Knowledge Graphs or pre-trained NLP models. Our evaluation shows that considering topic information, especially in connection with external information, provides a significant performance boost for the argument mining task.

  • 3 authors
·
May 26, 2019

EPIE Dataset: A Corpus For Possible Idiomatic Expressions

Idiomatic expressions have always been a bottleneck for language comprehension and natural language understanding, specifically for tasks like Machine Translation(MT). MT systems predominantly produce literal translations of idiomatic expressions as they do not exhibit generic and linguistically deterministic patterns which can be exploited for comprehension of the non-compositional meaning of the expressions. These expressions occur in parallel corpora used for training, but due to the comparatively high occurrences of the constituent words of idiomatic expressions in literal context, the idiomatic meaning gets overpowered by the compositional meaning of the expression. State of the art Metaphor Detection Systems are able to detect non-compositional usage at word level but miss out on idiosyncratic phrasal idiomatic expressions. This creates a dire need for a dataset with a wider coverage and higher occurrence of commonly occurring idiomatic expressions, the spans of which can be used for Metaphor Detection. With this in mind, we present our English Possible Idiomatic Expressions(EPIE) corpus containing 25206 sentences labelled with lexical instances of 717 idiomatic expressions. These spans also cover literal usages for the given set of idiomatic expressions. We also present the utility of our dataset by using it to train a sequence labelling module and testing on three independent datasets with high accuracy, precision and recall scores.

  • 2 authors
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Jun 16, 2020

RECOMP: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LMs with Compression and Selective Augmentation

Retrieving documents and prepending them in-context at inference time improves performance of language model (LMs) on a wide range of tasks. However, these documents, often spanning hundreds of words, make inference substantially more expensive. We propose compressing the retrieved documents into textual summaries prior to in-context integration. This not only reduces the computational costs but also relieves the burden of LMs to identify relevant information in long retrieved documents. We present two compressors -- an extractive compressor which selects useful sentences from retrieved documents and an abstractive compressor which generates summaries by synthesizing information from multiple documents. Both compressors are trained to improve LMs' performance on end tasks when the generated summaries are prepended to the LMs' input, while keeping the summary concise.If the retrieved documents are irrelevant to the input or offer no additional information to LM, our compressor can return an empty string, implementing selective augmentation.We evaluate our approach on language modeling task and open domain question answering task. We achieve a compression rate of as low as 6% with minimal loss in performance for both tasks, significantly outperforming the off-the-shelf summarization models. We show that our compressors trained for one LM can transfer to other LMs on the language modeling task and provide summaries largely faithful to the retrieved documents.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 6, 2023

LECTOR: Joint Optimization of Scientific Reasoning Graphs and Introduction Generation

AI Scientists have shown promising progress across multiple stages of the research pipeline, among which automatic scientific paper writing remains a formidable challenge. The Introduction writing is especially challenging, which demands not only linguistic fluency, but logical soundness and verifiable faithfulness. Most AI-assisted methods treat the task as text generation instead of reasoning and structuring, leading to severe drawbacks, e.g., hallucinating citations. To address this, we first formulate the Content-Conditional Introduction Generation (CCIG) task, which requires grounding the Introduction in the paper's core evidence. We then propose LECTOR, a novel Logic-Expression Co-Reinforcement Learning framework that can strictly follow the scientist's logic, add high-quality citations and keep structured expressions. LECTOR first constructs a logic-reasoning graph from the paper's main body to serve as a verifiable logical blueprint. Subsequently, it employs a Logic-Expression Co-Rewarding mechanism to jointly optimize for both the graph's structural fidelity and the final narrative's quality. We conduct a dataset from Nature Communications papers to assess our method. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements in both logic fidelity and Introduction generation quality metrics, e.g., Graph Quality (+26.7%), Citation Quality (+8.6%), and Paper Consistency (+3.3%). Code and data are available at https://github.com/Xiao-Youth/LECTOR.

  • 6 authors
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May 24

Logic Induced High-Order Reasoning Network for Event-Event Relation Extraction

To understand a document with multiple events, event-event relation extraction (ERE) emerges as a crucial task, aiming to discern how natural events temporally or structurally associate with each other. To achieve this goal, our work addresses the problems of temporal event relation extraction (TRE) and subevent relation extraction (SRE). The latest methods for such problems have commonly built document-level event graphs for global reasoning across sentences. However, the edges between events are usually derived from external tools heuristically, which are not always reliable and may introduce noise. Moreover, they are not capable of preserving logical constraints among event relations, e.g., coreference constraint, symmetry constraint and conjunction constraint. These constraints guarantee coherence between different relation types,enabling the generation of a uniffed event evolution graph. In this work, we propose a novel method named LogicERE, which performs high-order event relation reasoning through modeling logic constraints. Speciffcally, different from conventional event graphs, we design a logic constraint induced graph (LCG) without any external tools. LCG involves event nodes where the interactions among them can model the coreference constraint, and event pairs nodes where the interactions among them can retain the symmetry constraint and conjunction constraint. Then we perform high-order reasoning on LCG with relational graph transformer to obtain enhanced event and event pair embeddings. Finally, we further incorporate logic constraint information via a joint logic learning module. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 19, 2024

Assessing the Sensitivity and Alignment of FOL Closeness Metrics

The recent successful paradigm of solving logical reasoning problems with tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverages translation of natural language (NL) statements into First-Order Logic~(FOL) and external theorem provers. However, the correctness of FOL statements, comprising operators and text, often go unverified due to the lack of a reliable evaluation metric for comparing generated and ground-truth FOLs. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the sensitivity of existing NL-, FOL-, and graph-based metrics to capture differences between a sampled FOL and its corresponding ground-truth. We then measure the alignment between a metric-based ranking of FOL outputs and a strong LLM as-a-judge. To do this, we first apply operator and text-based perturbations to ground-truth FOL statements to assess metric sensitivity. We then evaluate metric robustness by comparing the metrics against LLMs judgment. Our empirical findings highlight a clear oversensitivity in the n-gram metric BLEU for text perturbations. The operator perturbation affects the semantic graph metric Smatch++ for structural changes, and the FOL metric for specific operator changes. We observe a closer alignment between BertScore and LLM judgement, proving the importance of semantic evaluation. Additionally, we show that combining metrics enhances both robustness and sensitivity compared to using individual metrics.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 15, 2025

Structured prompt interrogation and recursive extraction of semantics (SPIRES): A method for populating knowledge bases using zero-shot learning

Creating knowledge bases and ontologies is a time consuming task that relies on a manual curation. AI/NLP approaches can assist expert curators in populating these knowledge bases, but current approaches rely on extensive training data, and are not able to populate arbitrary complex nested knowledge schemas. Here we present Structured Prompt Interrogation and Recursive Extraction of Semantics (SPIRES), a Knowledge Extraction approach that relies on the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot learning (ZSL) and general-purpose query answering from flexible prompts and return information conforming to a specified schema. Given a detailed, user-defined knowledge schema and an input text, SPIRES recursively performs prompt interrogation against GPT-3+ to obtain a set of responses matching the provided schema. SPIRES uses existing ontologies and vocabularies to provide identifiers for all matched elements. We present examples of use of SPIRES in different domains, including extraction of food recipes, multi-species cellular signaling pathways, disease treatments, multi-step drug mechanisms, and chemical to disease causation graphs. Current SPIRES accuracy is comparable to the mid-range of existing Relation Extraction (RE) methods, but has the advantage of easy customization, flexibility, and, crucially, the ability to perform new tasks in the absence of any training data. This method supports a general strategy of leveraging the language interpreting capabilities of LLMs to assemble knowledge bases, assisting manual knowledge curation and acquisition while supporting validation with publicly-available databases and ontologies external to the LLM. SPIRES is available as part of the open source OntoGPT package: https://github.com/ monarch-initiative/ontogpt.

  • 12 authors
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Apr 5, 2023

MoLoRAG: Bootstrapping Document Understanding via Multi-modal Logic-aware Retrieval

Document Understanding is a foundational AI capability with broad applications, and Document Question Answering (DocQA) is a key evaluation task. Traditional methods convert the document into text for processing by Large Language Models (LLMs), but this process strips away critical multi-modal information like figures. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) address this limitation, their constrained input size makes multi-page document comprehension infeasible. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods mitigate this by selecting relevant pages, but they rely solely on semantic relevance, ignoring logical connections between pages and the query, which is essential for reasoning. To this end, we propose MoLoRAG, a logic-aware retrieval framework for multi-modal, multi-page document understanding. By constructing a page graph that captures contextual relationships between pages, a lightweight VLM performs graph traversal to retrieve relevant pages, including those with logical connections often overlooked. This approach combines semantic and logical relevance to deliver more accurate retrieval. After retrieval, the top-K pages are fed into arbitrary LVLMs for question answering. To enhance flexibility, MoLoRAG offers two variants: a training-free solution for easy deployment and a fine-tuned version to improve logical relevance checking. Experiments on four DocQA datasets demonstrate average improvements of 9.68% in accuracy over LVLM direct inference and 7.44% in retrieval precision over baselines. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/WxxShirley/MoLoRAG.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 5, 2025

Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation for Universal Information Extraction

Information Extraction (IE) aims to extract structural knowledge (e.g., entities, relations, events) from natural language texts, which brings challenges to existing methods due to task-specific schemas and complex text expressions. Code, as a typical kind of formalized language, is capable of describing structural knowledge under various schemas in a universal way. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on both codes and texts have demonstrated powerful capabilities of transforming texts into codes, which provides a feasible solution to IE tasks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a universal retrieval-augmented code generation framework based on LLMs, called Code4UIE, for IE tasks. Specifically, Code4UIE adopts Python classes to define task-specific schemas of various structural knowledge in a universal way. By so doing, extracting knowledge under these schemas can be transformed into generating codes that instantiate the predefined Python classes with the information in texts. To generate these codes more precisely, Code4UIE adopts the in-context learning mechanism to instruct LLMs with examples. In order to obtain appropriate examples for different tasks, Code4UIE explores several example retrieval strategies, which can retrieve examples semantically similar to the given texts. Extensive experiments on five representative IE tasks across nine datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the Code4UIE framework.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 6, 2023

A & B == B & A: Triggering Logical Reasoning Failures in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have propelled Artificial Intelligence (AI) to new heights, enabling breakthroughs in various tasks such as writing assistance, code generation, and machine translation. A significant distinction of advanced LLMs, such as ChatGPT, is their demonstrated ability to "reason." However, evaluating the reasoning ability of LLMs remains a challenge as most existing evaluations focus on their accuracy on the downstream tasks rather than directly assessing their reasoning processes. Efforts have been made to develop benchmarks and metrics to assess reasoning in LLMs, but they suffer from data leakage or limited scope. In this paper, we introduce LogicAsker, an automatic approach that comprehensively evaluates and improves the logical reasoning abilities of LLMs under a set of atomic reasoning skills based on propositional and predicate logic. The results provide insights into LLMs' reasoning abilities and reveal the logical rules the LLMs did not learn well. We evaluate LogicAsker on six widely deployed LLMs, including GPT-3, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, Vicuna, and Guanaco. The results show that test cases from LogicAsker can find logical reasoning failures in different LLMs with a rate of 25\% - 94\%. In addition, the test cases of LogicAsker can be further used to design demonstration examples for in-context learning, which effectively improves the logical reasoning ability of LLMs, e.g., 10\% for GPT-4. As far as we know, our work is the first to create prompts based on testing results to improve LLMs' formal reasoning ability effectively. All the code, data, and results will be released for reproduction and future research.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 1, 2024