Wenchao Li

Weichao Zhou, Jiaxin Zhang, Hilaf Hasson et al.

In retrieval-augmented systems, context ranking techniques are commonly employed to reorder the retrieved contexts based on their relevance to a user query. A standard approach is to measure this relevance through the similarity between contexts and queries in the embedding space. However, such similarity often fails to capture the relevance. Alternatively, large language models (LLMs) have been used for ranking contexts. However, they can encounter scalability issues when the number of candidate contexts grows and the context window sizes of the LLMs remain constrained. Additionally, these approaches require fine-tuning LLMs with domain-specific data. In this work, we introduce a scalable ranking framework that combines embedding similarity and LLM capabilities without requiring LLM fine-tuning. Our framework uses a pre-trained LLM to hypothesize the user query based on the retrieved contexts and ranks the context based on the similarity between the hypothesized queries and the user query. Our framework is efficient at inference time and is compatible with many other retrieval and ranking techniques. Experimental results show that our method improves the ranking performance across multiple benchmarks. The complete code and data are available at https://github.com/zwc662/hyqe

Weichao Zhou, Wenchao Li

Many imitation learning (IL) algorithms employ inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to infer the intrinsic reward function that an expert is implicitly optimizing for based on their demonstrated behaviors. However, in practice, IRL-based IL can fail to accomplish the underlying task due to a misalignment between the inferred reward and the objective of the task. In this paper, we address the susceptibility of IL to such misalignment by introducing a semi-supervised reward design paradigm called Protagonist Antagonist Guided Adversarial Reward (PAGAR). PAGAR-based IL trains a policy to perform well under mixed reward functions instead of a single reward function as in IRL-based IL. We identify the theoretical conditions under which PAGAR-based IL can avoid the task failures caused by reward misalignment. We also present a practical on-and-off policy approach to implementing PAGAR-based IL. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms standard IL baselines in complex tasks and challenging transfer settings.