Jesse Brouwers

Matey Krastev, Miklos Hamar, Danilo Toapanta et al.

This work revisits and extends synthetic query generation pipelines for Neural Information Retrieval (NIR) by leveraging the InPars Toolkit, a reproducible, end-to-end framework for generating training data using large language models (LLMs). We first assess the reproducibility of the original InPars, InPars-V2, and Promptagator pipelines on the SciFact benchmark and validate their effectiveness using open-source reranker and generator models. Building on this foundation, we introduce two key extensions to the pipeline: (1) fine-tuning a query generator LLM via Contrastive Preference Optimization (CPO) to improve the signal quality in generated queries, and (2) replacing static prompt templates with dynamic, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) optimized prompts using the DSPy framework. Our results show that both extensions reduce the need for aggressive filtering while improving retrieval performance. All code, models, and synthetic datasets are publicly released to support further research at: \href{https://github.com/danilotpnta/IR2-project}{this https URL}.

Jesse Brouwers, Xiaoyan Xing, Alexander Timans

Foundation models for segmentation such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) family exhibit strong zero-shot performance, but remain vulnerable in shifted or limited-knowledge domains. This work investigates whether uncertainty quantification can mitigate such challenges and enhance model generalisability in a domain-agnostic manner. To this end, we (1) curate UncertSAM, a benchmark comprising eight datasets designed to stress-test SAM under challenging segmentation conditions including shadows, transparency, and camouflage; (2) evaluate a suite of lightweight, post-hoc uncertainty estimation methods; and (3) assess a preliminary uncertainty-guided prediction refinement step. Among evaluated approaches, a last-layer Laplace approximation yields uncertainty estimates that correlate well with segmentation errors, indicating a meaningful signal. While refinement benefits are preliminary, our findings underscore the potential of incorporating uncertainty into segmentation models to support robust, domain-agnostic performance. Our benchmark and code are made publicly available.