AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark

Evaluation plays a crucial role in the advancement of information retrieval (IR) models. However, current benchmarks, which are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data, face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains both cost-effectively and efficiently. To address this challenge, we propose the Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (AIR-Bench). AIR-Bench is distinguished by three key features: 1) Automated. The testing data in AIR-Bench is automatically generated by large language models (LLMs) without human intervention. 2) Heterogeneous. The testing data in AIR-Bench is generated with respect to diverse tasks, domains and languages. 3) Dynamic. The domains and languages covered by AIR-Bench are constantly augmented to provide an increasingly comprehensive evaluation benchmark for community developers. We develop a reliable and robust data generation pipeline to automatically create diverse and high-quality evaluation datasets based on real-world corpora. Our findings demonstrate that the generated testing data in AIR-Bench aligns well with human-labeled testing data, making AIR-Bench a dependable benchmark for evaluating IR models. The resources in AIR-Bench are publicly available at https://github.com/AIR-Bench/AIR-Bench.

jina-clip-v2: Multilingual Multimodal Embeddings for Text and Images

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) is a highly effective method for aligning images and texts in a shared embedding space. These models are widely used for tasks such as cross-modal information retrieval and multi-modal understanding. However, CLIP models often struggle with text-only tasks, underperforming compared to specialized text models. This performance disparity forces retrieval systems to rely on separate models for text-only and multi-modal tasks. In this work, we build upon our previous model, jina-clip-v1, by introducing a refined framework that utilizes multi-task, multi-stage contrastive learning across multiple languages, coupled with an improved training recipe to enhance text-only retrieval. The resulting model, jina-clip-v2, outperforms its predecessor on text-only and multimodal tasks, while adding multilingual support, better understanding of complex visual documents and efficiency gains thanks to Matryoshka Representation Learning and vector truncation. The model performs comparably to the state-of-the-art in both multilingual-multimodal and multilingual text retrieval benchmarks, addressing the challenge of unifying text-only and multi-modal retrieval systems.

ACE-Net: AutofoCus-Enhanced Convolutional Network for Field Imperfection Estimation with application to high b-value spiral Diffusion MRI

Spatiotemporal magnetic field variations from B0-inhomogeneity and diffusion-encoding-induced eddy-currents can be detrimental to rapid image-encoding schemes such as spiral, EPI and 3D-cones, resulting in undesirable image artifacts. In this work, a data driven approach for automatic estimation of these field imperfections is developed by combining autofocus metrics with deep learning, and by leveraging a compact basis representation of the expected field imperfections. The method was applied to single-shot spiral diffusion MRI at high b-values where accurate estimation of B0 and eddy were obtained, resulting in high quality image reconstruction without need for additional external calibrations.

cHyRRT and cHySST: Two Motion Planning Tools for Hybrid Dynamical Systems

This paper describes two C++/Open Motion Planning Library implementations of the recently developed motion planning algorithms HyRRT arXiv:2210.15082v1 [cs.RO] and HySST arXiv:2305.18649v1 [cs.RO]. Specifically, cHyRRT, an implementation of the HyRRT algorithm, is capable of generating a solution to a motion planning problem for hybrid systems with probabilistically completeness, while cHySST, an implementation of the asymptotically near-optimal HySST algorithm, is capable of computing a trajectory to solve the optimal motion planning problem for hybrid systems. cHyRRT is suitable for motion planning problems where an optimal solution is not required, whereas cHySST is suitable for such problems that prefer optimal solutions, within all feasible solutions. The structure, components, and usage of the two tools are described. Examples are included to illustrate the main capabilities of the toolbox.

XRDSLAM: A Flexible and Modular Framework for Deep Learning based SLAM

In this paper, we propose a flexible SLAM framework, XRDSLAM. It adopts a modular code design and a multi-process running mechanism, providing highly reusable foundational modules such as unified dataset management, 3d visualization, algorithm configuration, and metrics evaluation. It can help developers quickly build a complete SLAM system, flexibly combine different algorithm modules, and conduct standardized benchmarking for accuracy and efficiency comparison. Within this framework, we integrate several state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms with different types, including NeRF and 3DGS based SLAM, and even odometry or reconstruction algorithms, which demonstrates the flexibility and extensibility. We also conduct a comprehensive comparison and evaluation of these integrated algorithms, analyzing the characteristics of each. Finally, we contribute all the code, configuration and data to the open-source community, which aims to promote the widespread research and development of SLAM technology within the open-source ecosystem.

jina-embeddings-v3: Multilingual Embeddings With Task LoRA

We introduce jina-embeddings-v3, a novel text embedding model with 570 million parameters, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multilingual data and long-context retrieval tasks, supporting context lengths of up to 8192 tokens. The model includes a set of task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters to generate high-quality embeddings for query-document retrieval, clustering, classification, and text matching. Additionally, Matryoshka Representation Learning is integrated into the training process, allowing flexible truncation of embedding dimensions without compromising performance. Evaluation on the MTEB benchmark shows that jina-embeddings-v3 outperforms the latest proprietary embeddings from OpenAI and Cohere on English tasks, while achieving superior performance compared to multilingual-e5-large-instruct across all multilingual tasks.

Jina-ColBERT-v2: A General-Purpose Multilingual Late Interaction Retriever

Multi-vector dense models, such as ColBERT, have proven highly effective in information retrieval. ColBERT's late interaction scoring approximates the joint query-document attention seen in cross-encoders while maintaining inference efficiency closer to traditional dense retrieval models, thanks to its bi-encoder architecture and recent optimizations in indexing and search. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture and a training framework to support long context window and multilingual retrieval. Our new model, Jina-ColBERT-v2, demonstrates strong performance across a range of English and multilingual retrieval tasks,

LLM-based MOFs Synthesis Condition Extraction using Few-Shot Demonstrations

The extraction of Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) synthesis conditions from literature text has been challenging but crucial for the logical design of new MOFs with desirable functionality. The recent advent of large language models (LLMs) provides disruptively new solution to this long-standing problem and latest researches have reported over 90% F1 in extracting correct conditions from MOFs literature. We argue in this paper that most existing synthesis extraction practices with LLMs stay with the primitive zero-shot learning, which could lead to downgraded extraction and application performance due to the lack of specialized knowledge. This work pioneers and optimizes the few-shot in-context learning paradigm for LLM extraction of material synthesis conditions. First, we propose a human-AI joint data curation process to secure high-quality ground-truth demonstrations for few-shot learning. Second, we apply a BM25 algorithm based on the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique to adaptively select few-shot demonstrations for each MOF's extraction. Over a dataset randomly sampled from 84,898 well-defined MOFs, the proposed few-shot method achieves much higher average F1 performance (0.93 vs. 0.81, +14.8%) than the native zero-shot LLM using the same GPT-4 model, under fully automatic evaluation that are more objective than the previous human evaluation. The proposed method is further validated through real-world material experiments: compared with the baseline zero-shot LLM, the proposed few-shot approach increases the MOFs structural inference performance (R^2) by 29.4% in average.

Leveraging Passage Embeddings for Efficient Listwise Reranking with Large Language Models

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of using large language language models (LLMs) in passage ranking. The listwise approaches, such as RankGPT, have become new state-of-the-art in this task. However, the efficiency of RankGPT models is limited by the maximum context length and relatively high latency of LLM inference. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose PE-Rank, leveraging the single passage embedding as a good context compression for efficient listwise passage reranking. By treating each passage as a special token, we can directly input passage embeddings into LLMs, thereby reducing input length. Additionally, we introduce an inference method that dynamically constrains the decoding space to these special tokens, accelerating the decoding process. For adapting the model to reranking, we employ listwise learning to rank loss for training. Evaluation results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PE-Rank significantly improves efficiency in both prefilling and decoding, while maintaining competitive ranking effectiveness. {The Code is available at \url{https://github.com/liuqi6777/pe_rank}.}

Faster Convergence on Heterogeneous Federated Edge Learning: An Adaptive Sidelink-Assisted Data Multicasting Approach

Federated Edge Learning (FEEL) emerges as a pioneering distributed machine learning paradigm for the 6G Hyper-Connectivity, harnessing data from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices while upholding data privacy. However, current FEEL algorithms struggle with non-independent and non-identically distributed (non-IID) data, leading to elevated communication costs and compromised model accuracy. To address these statistical imbalances within FEEL, we introduce a clustered data sharing framework, mitigating data heterogeneity by selectively sharing partial data from cluster heads to trusted associates through sidelink-aided multicasting. The collective communication pattern is integral to FEEL training, where both cluster formation and the efficiency of communication and computation impact training latency and accuracy simultaneously. To tackle the strictly coupled data sharing and resource optimization, we decompose the overall optimization problem into the clients clustering and effective data sharing subproblems. Specifically, a distribution-based adaptive clustering algorithm (DACA) is devised basing on three deductive cluster forming conditions, which ensures the maximum sharing yield. Meanwhile, we design a stochastic optimization based joint computed frequency and shared data volume optimization (JFVO) algorithm, determining the optimal resource allocation with an uncertain objective function. The experiments show that the proposed framework facilitates FEEL on non-IID datasets with faster convergence rate and higher model accuracy in a limited communication environment.