Exploring Training and Inference Scaling Laws in Generative Retrieval

Generative retrieval has emerged as a novel paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) to autoregressively generate document identifiers. Although promising, the mechanisms that underpin its performance and scalability remain largely unclear. We conduct a systematic investigation of training and inference scaling laws in generative retrieval, exploring how model size, training data scale, and inference-time compute jointly influence retrieval performance. To address the lack of suitable metrics, we propose a novel evaluation measure inspired by contrastive entropy and generation loss, providing a continuous performance signal that enables robust comparisons across diverse generative retrieval methods. Our experiments show that n-gram-based methods demonstrate strong alignment with both training and inference scaling laws, especially when paired with larger LLMs. Furthermore, increasing inference computation yields substantial performance gains, revealing that generative retrieval can significantly benefit from higher compute budgets at inference. Across these settings, LLaMA models consistently outperform T5 models, suggesting a particular advantage for larger decoder-only models in generative retrieval. Taken together, our findings underscore that model sizes, data availability, and inference computation interact to unlock the full potential of generative retrieval, offering new insights for designing and optimizing future systems.

OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) for code have become indispensable in various domains, including code generation, reasoning tasks and agent systems.While open-access code LLMs are increasingly approaching the performance levels of proprietary models, high-quality code LLMs suitable for rigorous scientific investigation, particularly those with reproducible data processing pipelines and transparent training protocols, remain limited. The scarcity is due to various challenges, including resource constraints, ethical considerations, and the competitive advantages of keeping models advanced. To address the gap, we introduce OpenCoder, a top-tier code LLM that not only achieves performance comparable to leading models but also serves as an ``open cookbook'' for the research community. Unlike most prior efforts, we release not only model weights and inference code, but also the reproducible training data, complete data processing pipeline, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols for open scientific research. Through this comprehensive release, we identify the key ingredients for building a top-tier code LLM: (1) code optimized heuristic rules for data cleaning and methods for data deduplication, (2) recall of text corpus related to code and (3) high-quality synthetic data in both annealing and supervised fine-tuning stages. By offering this level of openness, we aim to broaden access to all aspects of a top-tier code LLM, with OpenCoder serving as both a powerful model and an open foundation to accelerate research, and enable reproducible advancements in code AI.

Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capacity to improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. Two strategies are designed to perform this iterative process: Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompt. Prompt chaining orchestrates the drafting, critiquing, and refining phases through a series of three discrete prompts, while Stepwise prompt integrates these phases within a single prompt. However, the relative effectiveness of the two methods has not been extensively studied. This paper is dedicated to examining and comparing these two methods in the context of text summarization to ascertain which method stands out as the most effective. Experimental results show that the prompt chaining method can produce a more favorable outcome. This might be because stepwise prompt might produce a simulated refinement process according to our various experiments. Since refinement is adaptable to diverse tasks, our conclusions have the potential to be extrapolated to other applications, thereby offering insights that may contribute to the broader development of LLMs.

The Critique of Critique

Critique, as a natural language description for assessing the quality of model-generated content, has been proven to play an essential role in the training, evaluation, and refinement of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there is a lack of principled understanding in evaluating the quality of the critique itself. In this paper, we pioneer the critique of critique, termed MetaCritique, which is a framework to evaluate the critique from two aspects, i.e., factuality as precision score and comprehensiveness as recall score. We calculate the harmonic mean of precision and recall as the overall rating called F1 score. To obtain a reliable evaluation outcome, we propose Atomic Information Units (AIUs), which describe the critique in a more fine-grained manner. MetaCritique takes each AIU into account and aggregates each AIU's judgment for the overall score. Moreover, given the evaluation process involves intricate reasoning, our MetaCritique provides a natural language rationale to support each judgment. We construct a meta-evaluation dataset containing 300 critiques (2653 AIUs) across four tasks (question answering, reasoning, entailment, and summarization), and we conduct a comparative study to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness. Experiments also show superior critique judged by MetaCritique leads to better refinement, indicating generative artificial intelligence indeed has the potential to be significantly advanced with our MetaCritique. We will release relevant code and meta-evaluation datasets at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/MetaCritique.

Evolving Large Language Model Assistant with Long-Term Conditional Memory

With the rapid development of large language models, AI assistants like ChatGPT have widely entered people's works and lives. In this paper, we present an evolving large language model assistant that utilizes verbal long-term memory. It focuses on preserving the knowledge and experience from the history dialogue between the user and AI assistant, which can be applied to future dialogue for generating a better response. The model generates a set of records for each finished dialogue and stores them in the memory. In later usage, given a new user input, the model uses it to retrieve its related memory to improve the quality of the response. To find the best form of memory, we explore different ways of constructing the memory and propose a new memorizing mechanism called conditional memory to solve the problems in previous methods. We also investigate the retrieval and usage of memory in the generation process. The assistant uses GPT-4 as the backbone and we evaluate it on three constructed test datasets focusing on different abilities required by an AI assistant with long-term memory.

RefGPT: Reference -> Truthful & Customized Dialogues Generation by GPTs and for GPTs

General chat models, like ChatGPT, have attained impressive capability to resolve a wide range of NLP tasks by tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with high-quality instruction data. However, collecting human-written high-quality data, especially multi-turn dialogues, is expensive and unattainable for most people. Though previous studies have used powerful LLMs to generate the dialogues automatically, but they all suffer from generating untruthful dialogues because of the LLMs hallucination. Therefore, we propose a method called RefGPT to generate enormous truthful and customized dialogues without worrying about factual errors caused by the model hallucination. RefGPT solves the model hallucination in dialogue generation by restricting the LLMs to leverage the given reference instead of reciting their own knowledge to generate dialogues. Additionally, RefGPT adds detailed controls on every utterances to enable highly customization capability, which previous studies have ignored. On the basis of RefGPT, we also propose two high-quality dialogue datasets generated by GPT-4, namely RefGPT-Fact and RefGPT-Code. RefGPT-Fact is 100k multi-turn dialogue datasets based on factual knowledge and RefGPT-Code is 76k multi-turn dialogue dataset covering a wide range of coding scenarios. Our code and datasets are released in https://github.com/ziliwangnlp/RefGPT

Improving Sentence Similarity Estimation for Unsupervised Extractive Summarization

Unsupervised extractive summarization aims to extract salient sentences from a document as the summary without labeled data. Recent literatures mostly research how to leverage sentence similarity to rank sentences in the order of salience. However, sentence similarity estimation using pre-trained language models mostly takes little account of document-level information and has a weak correlation with sentence salience ranking. In this paper, we proposed two novel strategies to improve sentence similarity estimation for unsupervised extractive summarization. We use contrastive learning to optimize a document-level objective that sentences from the same document are more similar than those from different documents. Moreover, we use mutual learning to enhance the relationship between sentence similarity estimation and sentence salience ranking, where an extra signal amplifier is used to refine the pivotal information. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategies.

Few-shot Query-Focused Summarization with Prefix-Merging

Query-focused summarization has been considered as an important extension for text summarization. It aims to generate a concise highlight for a given query. Different from text summarization, query-focused summarization has long been plagued by the problem of lacking high-quality large-scale datasets. In this paper, we investigate the idea that whether we can integrate and transfer the knowledge of text summarization and question answering to assist the few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Here, we propose prefix-merging, a prefix-based pretraining strategy for few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Drawn inspiration from prefix-tuning, we are allowed to integrate the task knowledge from text summarization and question answering into a properly designed prefix and apply the merged prefix to query-focused summarization. With only a small amount of trainable parameters, prefix-merging outperforms fine-tuning on query-focused summarization. We further discuss the influence of different prefix designs and propose a visualized explanation for how prefix-merging works.

Fact-level Extractive Summarization with Hierarchical Graph Mask on BERT

Most current extractive summarization models generate summaries by selecting salient sentences. However, one of the problems with sentence-level extractive summarization is that there exists a gap between the human-written gold summary and the oracle sentence labels. In this paper, we propose to extract fact-level semantic units for better extractive summarization. We also introduce a hierarchical structure, which incorporates the multi-level of granularities of the textual information into the model. In addition, we incorporate our model with BERT using a hierarchical graph mask. This allows us to combine BERT's ability in natural language understanding and the structural information without increasing the scale of the model. Experiments on the CNN/DaliyMail dataset show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results.