Measuring Risk of Bias in Biomedical Reports: The RoBBR Benchmark

Systems that answer questions by reviewing the scientific literature are becoming increasingly feasible. To draw reliable conclusions, these systems should take into account the quality of available evidence, placing more weight on studies that use a valid methodology. We present a benchmark for measuring the methodological strength of biomedical papers, drawing on the risk-of-bias framework used for systematic reviews. The four benchmark tasks, drawn from more than 500 papers, cover the analysis of research study methodology, followed by evaluation of risk of bias in these studies. The benchmark contains 2000 expert-generated bias annotations, and a human-validated pipeline for fine-grained alignment with research paper content. We evaluate a range of large language models on the benchmark, and find that these models fall significantly short of expert-level performance. By providing a standardized tool for measuring judgments of study quality, the benchmark can help to guide systems that perform large-scale aggregation of scientific data. The dataset is available at https://github.com/RoBBR-Benchmark/RoBBR.

Adapting While Learning: Grounding LLMs for Scientific Problems with Intelligent Tool Usage Adaptation

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in solving simple scientific problems but often produce hallucinations for complex ones. While integrating LLMs with tools can increase reliability, this approach typically results in over-reliance on tools, diminishing the model's ability to solve simple problems through basic reasoning. In contrast, human experts first assess problem complexity using domain knowledge before choosing an appropriate solution approach. Inspired by this human problem-solving process, we propose a novel two-component fine-tuning method. In the first component World Knowledge Distillation (WKD), LLMs learn directly from solutions generated using tool's information to internalize domain knowledge. In the second component Tool Usage Adaptation (TUA), we partition problems into easy and hard categories based on the model's direct answering accuracy. While maintaining the same alignment target for easy problems as in WKD, we train the model to intelligently switch to tool usage for more challenging problems. We validate our method on six scientific benchmark datasets, spanning mathematics, climate science and epidemiology. On average, our models demonstrate a 28.18% improvement in answer accuracy and a 13.89% increase in tool usage precision across all datasets, surpassing state-of-the-art models including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5.

ClimaQA: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Climate Foundation Models

The use of foundation models in climate science has recently gained significant attention. However, a critical issue remains: the lack of a comprehensive evaluation framework capable of assessing the quality and scientific validity of model outputs. To address this issue, we develop ClimaGen (Climate QA Generator), an automated algorithmic framework that generates question-answer pairs from graduate textbooks with climate scientists in the loop. As a result, we present ClimaQA-Gold, an expert-annotated benchmark dataset alongside ClimaQA-Silver, a large-scale, comprehensive synthetic QA dataset for climate science. Finally, we develop evaluation strategies and compare different Large Language Models (LLMs) on our benchmarks. Our results offer novel insights into various approaches used to enhance climate foundation models.

Dissociation of Faithful and Unfaithful Reasoning in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) improve their performance in downstream tasks when they generate Chain of Thought reasoning text before producing an answer. Our research investigates how LLMs recover from errors in Chain of Thought, reaching the correct final answer despite mistakes in the reasoning text. Through analysis of these error recovery behaviors, we find evidence for unfaithfulness in Chain of Thought, but we also identify many clear examples of faithful error recovery behaviors. We identify factors that shift LLM recovery behavior: LLMs recover more frequently from obvious errors and in contexts that provide more evidence for the correct answer. However, unfaithful recoveries show the opposite behavior, occurring more frequently for more difficult error positions. Our results indicate that there are distinct mechanisms driving faithful and unfaithful error recoveries. Our results challenge the view that LLM reasoning is a uniform, coherent process.

IR2: Information Regularization for Information Retrieval

Effective information retrieval (IR) in settings with limited training data, particularly for complex queries, remains a challenging task. This paper introduces IR2, Information Regularization for Information Retrieval, a technique for reducing overfitting during synthetic data generation. This approach, representing a novel application of regularization techniques in synthetic data creation for IR, is tested on three recent IR tasks characterized by complex queries: DORIS-MAE, ArguAna, and WhatsThatBook. Experimental results indicate that our regularization techniques not only outperform previous synthetic query generation methods on the tasks considered but also reduce cost by up to 50%. Furthermore, this paper categorizes and explores three regularization methods at different stages of the query synthesis pipeline-input, prompt, and output-each offering varying degrees of performance improvement compared to models where no regularization is applied. This provides a systematic approach for optimizing synthetic data generation in data-limited, complex-query IR scenarios. All code, prompts and synthetic data are available at https://github.com/Info-Regularization/Information-Regularization.

BIRCO: A Benchmark of Information Retrieval Tasks with Complex Objectives

We present the Benchmark of Information Retrieval (IR) tasks with Complex Objectives (BIRCO). BIRCO evaluates the ability of IR systems to retrieve documents given multi-faceted user objectives. The benchmark's complexity and compact size make it suitable for evaluating large language model (LLM)-based information retrieval systems. We present a modular framework for investigating factors that may influence LLM performance on retrieval tasks, and identify a simple baseline model which matches or outperforms existing approaches and more complex alternatives. No approach achieves satisfactory performance on all benchmark tasks, suggesting that stronger models and new retrieval protocols are necessary to address complex user needs.

DORIS-MAE: Scientific Document Retrieval using Multi-level Aspect-based Queries

In scientific research, the ability to effectively retrieve relevant documents based on complex, multifaceted queries is critical. Existing evaluation datasets for this task are limited, primarily due to the high cost and effort required to annotate resources that effectively represent complex queries. To address this, we propose a novel task, Scientific DOcument Retrieval using Multi-level Aspect-based quEries (DORIS-MAE), which is designed to handle the complex nature of user queries in scientific research. We developed a benchmark dataset within the field of computer science, consisting of 100 human-authored complex query cases. For each complex query, we assembled a collection of 100 relevant documents and produced annotated relevance scores for ranking them. Recognizing the significant labor of expert annotation, we also introduce Anno-GPT, a scalable framework for validating the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on expert-level dataset annotation tasks. LLM annotation of the DORIS-MAE dataset resulted in a 500x reduction in cost, without compromising quality. Furthermore, due to the multi-tiered structure of these complex queries, the DORIS-MAE dataset can be extended to over 4,000 sub-query test cases without requiring additional annotation. We evaluated 17 recent retrieval methods on DORIS-MAE, observing notable performance drops compared to traditional datasets. This highlights the need for better approaches to handle complex, multifaceted queries in scientific research. Our dataset and codebase are available at https://github.com/Real-Doris-Mae/Doris-Mae-Dataset.

Systematic Generalization with Edge Transformers

Recent research suggests that systematic generalization in natural language understanding remains a challenge for state-of-the-art neural models such as Transformers and Graph Neural Networks. To tackle this challenge, we propose Edge Transformer, a new model that combines inspiration from Transformers and rule-based symbolic AI. The first key idea in Edge Transformers is to associate vector states with every edge, that is, with every pair of input nodes -- as opposed to just every node, as it is done in the Transformer model. The second major innovation is a triangular attention mechanism that updates edge representations in a way that is inspired by unification from logic programming. We evaluate Edge Transformer on compositional generalization benchmarks in relational reasoning, semantic parsing, and dependency parsing. In all three settings, the Edge Transformer outperforms Relation-aware, Universal and classical Transformer baselines.

Jointly Learning Truth-Conditional Denotations and Groundings using Parallel Attention

We present a model that jointly learns the denotations of words together with their groundings using a truth-conditional semantics. Our model builds on the neurosymbolic approach of Mao et al. (2019), learning to ground objects in the CLEVR dataset (Johnson et al., 2017) using a novel parallel attention mechanism. The model achieves state of the art performance on visual question answering, learning to detect and ground objects with question performance as the only training signal. We also show that the model is able to learn flexible non-canonical groundings just by adjusting answers to questions in the training set.

Word Frequency Does Not Predict Grammatical Knowledge in Language Models

Neural language models learn, to varying degrees of accuracy, the grammatical properties of natural languages. In this work, we investigate whether there are systematic sources of variation in the language models' accuracy. Focusing on subject-verb agreement and reflexive anaphora, we find that certain nouns are systematically understood better than others, an effect which is robust across grammatical tasks and different language models. Surprisingly, we find that across four orders of magnitude, corpus frequency is unrelated to a noun's performance on grammatical tasks. Finally, we find that a novel noun's grammatical properties can be few-shot learned from various types of training data. The results present a paradox: there should be less variation in grammatical performance than is actually observed.