Daniel Campos

Daniel Campos, Daniel Perry, Samir Joshi et al. · amazon-science

Experience management is an emerging business area where organizations focus on understanding the feedback of customers and employees in order to improve their end-to-end experiences. This results in a unique set of machine learning problems to help understand how people feel, discover issues they care about, and find which actions need to be taken on data that are different in content and distribution from traditional NLP domains. In this paper, we present a case study of building text analysis applications that perform multiple classification tasks efficiently in 12 languages in the nascent business area of experience management. In order to scale up modern ML methods on experience data, we leverage cross lingual and multi-task modeling techniques to consolidate our models into a single deployment to avoid overhead. We also make use of model compression and model distillation to reduce overall inference latency and hardware cost to the level acceptable for business needs while maintaining model prediction quality. Our findings show that multi-task modeling improves task performance for a subset of experience management tasks in both XLM-R and mBert architectures. Among the compressed architectures we explored, we found that MiniLM achieved the best compression/performance tradeoff. Our case study demonstrates a speedup of up to 15.61x with 2.60% average task degradation (or 3.29x speedup with 1.71% degradation) and estimated savings of 44% over using the original full-size model. These results demonstrate a successful scaling up of text classification for the challenging new area of ML for experience management.

Daniel Campos, Surya Kallumadi, Corby Rosset et al.

This is the first year of the TREC Product search track. The focus this year was the creation of a reusable collection and evaluation of the impact of the use of metadata and multi-modal data on retrieval accuracy. This year we leverage the new product search corpus, which includes contextual metadata. Our analysis shows that in the product search domain, traditional retrieval systems are highly effective and commonly outperform general-purpose pretrained embedding models. Our analysis also evaluates the impact of using simplified and metadata-enhanced collections, finding no clear trend in the impact of the expanded collection. We also see some surprising outcomes; despite their widespread adoption and competitive performance on other tasks, we find single-stage dense retrieval runs can commonly be noncompetitive or generate low-quality results both in the zero-shot and fine-tuned domain.

Nick Craswell, Bhaskar Mitra, Emine Yilmaz et al. · microsoft-research

This is the third year of the TREC Deep Learning track. As in previous years, we leverage the MS MARCO datasets that made hundreds of thousands of human annotated training labels available for both passage and document ranking tasks. In addition, this year we refreshed both the document and the passage collections which also led to a nearly four times increase in the document collection size and nearly $16$ times increase in the size of the passage collection. Deep neural ranking models that employ large scale pretraininig continued to outperform traditional retrieval methods this year. We also found that single stage retrieval can achieve good performance on both tasks although they still do not perform at par with multistage retrieval pipelines. Finally, the increase in the collection size and the general data refresh raised some questions about completeness of NIST judgments and the quality of the training labels that were mapped to the new collections from the old ones which we discuss in this report.

Nick Craswell, Bhaskar Mitra, Emine Yilmaz et al.

This is the fifth year of the TREC Deep Learning track. As in previous years, we leverage the MS MARCO datasets that made hundreds of thousands of human-annotated training labels available for both passage and document ranking tasks. We mostly repeated last year's design, to get another matching test set, based on the larger, cleaner, less-biased v2 passage and document set, with passage ranking as primary and document ranking as a secondary task (using labels inferred from passage). As we did last year, we sample from MS MARCO queries that were completely held out, unused in corpus construction, unlike the test queries in the first three years. This approach yields a more difficult test with more headroom for improvement. Alongside the usual MS MARCO (human) queries from MS MARCO, this year we generated synthetic queries using a fine-tuned T5 model and using a GPT-4 prompt. The new headline result this year is that runs using Large Language Model (LLM) prompting in some way outperformed runs that use the "nnlm" approach, which was the best approach in the previous four years. Since this is the last year of the track, future iterations of prompt-based ranking can happen in other tracks. Human relevance assessments were applied to all query types, not just human MS MARCO queries. Evaluation using synthetic queries gave similar results to human queries, with system ordering agreement of $τ=0.8487$. However, human effort was needed to select a subset of the synthetic queries that were usable. We did not see clear evidence of bias, where runs using GPT-4 were favored when evaluated using synthetic GPT-4 queries, or where runs using T5 were favored when evaluated on synthetic T5 queries.

Youngwon Lee, Seung-won Hwang, Daniel Campos et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a popular approach to steering the output of a large language model (LLM) by incorporating retrieved contexts as inputs. However, existing work observed the generator bias, such that improving the retrieval results may negatively affect the outcome. In this work, we show such bias can be mitigated, from inference scaling, aggregating inference calls from the permuted order of retrieved contexts. The proposed Mixture-of-Intervention (MOI) explicitly models the debiased utility of each passage with multiple forward passes to construct a new ranking. We also show that MOI can leverage the retriever's prior knowledge to reduce the computational cost by minimizing the number of permutations considered and lowering the cost per LLM call. We showcase the effectiveness of MOI on diverse RAG tasks, improving ROUGE-L on MS MARCO and EM on HotpotQA benchmarks by ~7 points.

Youngwon Lee, Seung-won Hwang, Daniel Campos et al.

With the adoption of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), large language models (LLMs) are expected to ground their generation to the retrieved contexts. Yet, this is hindered by position bias of LLMs, failing to evenly attend to all contexts. Previous work has addressed this by synthesizing contexts with perturbed positions of gold segment, creating a position-diversified train set. We extend this intuition to propose consistency regularization with augmentation and distillation. First, we augment each training instance with its position perturbation to encourage consistent predictions, regardless of ordering. We also distill behaviors of this pair, although it can be counterproductive in certain RAG scenarios where the given order from the retriever is crucial for generation quality. We thus propose CORD, balancing COnsistency and Rank Distillation. CORD adaptively samples noise-controlled perturbations from an interpolation space, ensuring both consistency and respect for the rank prior. Empirical results show this balance enables CORD to outperform consistently in diverse RAG benchmarks.

Daniel Campos, Heng Ji

Like many scientific fields, new chemistry literature has grown at a staggering pace, with thousands of papers released every month. A large portion of chemistry literature focuses on new molecules and reactions between molecules. Most vital information is conveyed through 2-D images of molecules, representing the underlying molecules or reactions described. In order to ensure reproducible and machine-readable molecule representations, text-based molecule descriptors like SMILES and SELFIES were created. These text-based molecule representations provide molecule generation but are unfortunately rarely present in published literature. In the absence of molecule descriptors, the generation of molecule descriptors from the 2-D images present in the literature is necessary to understand chemistry literature at scale. Successful methods such as Optical Structure Recognition Application (OSRA), and ChemSchematicResolver are able to extract the locations of molecules structures in chemistry papers and infer molecular descriptions and reactions. While effective, existing systems expect chemists to correct outputs, making them unsuitable for unsupervised large-scale data mining. Leveraging the task formulation of image captioning introduced by DECIMER, we introduce IMG2SMI, a model which leverages Deep Residual Networks for image feature extraction and an encoder-decoder Transformer layers for molecule description generation. Unlike previous Neural Network-based systems, IMG2SMI builds around the task of molecule description generation, which enables IMG2SMI to outperform OSRA-based systems by 163% in molecule similarity prediction as measured by the molecular MACCS Fingerprint Tanimoto Similarity. Additionally, to facilitate further research on this task, we release a new molecule prediction dataset. including 81 million molecules for molecule description generation