OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking

Machine writing with large language models often relies on retrieval-augmented generation. However, these approaches remain confined within the boundaries of the model's predefined scope, limiting the generation of content with rich information. Specifically, vanilla-retrieved information tends to lack depth, utility, and suffers from redundancy, which negatively impacts the quality of generated articles, leading to shallow, repetitive, and unoriginal outputs. To address these issues, we propose OmniThink, a machine writing framework that emulates the human-like process of iterative expansion and reflection. The core idea behind OmniThink is to simulate the cognitive behavior of learners as they progressively deepen their knowledge of the topics. Experimental results demonstrate that OmniThink improves the knowledge density of generated articles without compromising metrics such as coherence and depth. Human evaluations and expert feedback further highlight the potential of OmniThink to address real-world challenges in the generation of long-form articles.

WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) demonstrates remarkable performance across tasks in open-domain question-answering. However, traditional search engines may retrieve shallow content, limiting the ability of LLMs to handle complex, multi-layered information. To address it, we introduce WebWalkerQA, a benchmark designed to assess the ability of LLMs to perform web traversal. It evaluates the capacity of LLMs to traverse a website's subpages to extract high-quality data systematically. We propose WebWalker, which is a multi-agent framework that mimics human-like web navigation through an explore-critic paradigm. Extensive experimental results show that WebWalkerQA is challenging and demonstrates the effectiveness of RAG combined with WebWalker, through the horizontal and vertical integration in real-world scenarios.

Improving speech translation by fusing speech and text

In speech translation, leveraging multimodal data to improve model performance and address limitations of individual modalities has shown significant effectiveness. In this paper, we harness the complementary strengths of speech and text, which are disparate modalities. We observe three levels of modality gap between them, denoted by Modal input representation, Modal semantic, and Modal hidden states. To tackle these gaps, we propose \textbf{F}use-\textbf{S}peech-\textbf{T}ext (\textbf{FST}), a cross-modal model which supports three distinct input modalities for translation: speech, text, and fused speech-text. We leverage multiple techniques for cross-modal alignment and conduct a comprehensive analysis to assess its impact on speech translation, machine translation, and fused speech-text translation. We evaluate FST on MuST-C, GigaST, and newstest benchmark. Experiments show that the proposed FST achieves an average 34.0 BLEU on MuST-C En$\rightarrow$De/Es/Fr (vs SOTA +1.1 BLEU). Further experiments demonstrate that FST does not degrade on MT task, as observed in prior works. Instead, it yields an average improvement of 3.2 BLEU over the pre-trained MT model.