AGENT-CQ: Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Clarifying Questions for Conversational Search with LLMs

Generating diverse and effective clarifying questions is crucial for improving query understanding and retrieval performance in open-domain conversational search (CS) systems. We propose AGENT-CQ (Automatic GENeration, and evaluaTion of Clarifying Questions), an end-to-end LLM-based framework addressing the challenges of scalability and adaptability faced by existing methods that rely on manual curation or template-based approaches. AGENT-CQ consists of two stages: a generation stage employing LLM prompting strategies to generate clarifying questions, and an evaluation stage (CrowdLLM) that simulates human crowdsourcing judgments using multiple LLM instances to assess generated questions and answers based on comprehensive quality metrics. Extensive experiments on the ClariQ dataset demonstrate CrowdLLM's effectiveness in evaluating question and answer quality. Human evaluation and CrowdLLM show that the AGENT-CQ - generation stage, consistently outperforms baselines in various aspects of question and answer quality. In retrieval-based evaluation, LLM-generated questions significantly enhance retrieval effectiveness for both BM25 and cross-encoder models compared to human-generated questions.

Unlocking Markets: A Multilingual Benchmark to Cross-Market Question Answering

Users post numerous product-related questions on e-commerce platforms, affecting their purchase decisions. Product-related question answering (PQA) entails utilizing product-related resources to provide precise responses to users. We propose a novel task of Multilingual Cross-market Product-based Question Answering (MCPQA) and define the task as providing answers to product-related questions in a main marketplace by utilizing information from another resource-rich auxiliary marketplace in a multilingual context. We introduce a large-scale dataset comprising over 7 million questions from 17 marketplaces across 11 languages. We then perform automatic translation on the Electronics category of our dataset, naming it as McMarket. We focus on two subtasks: review-based answer generation and product-related question ranking. For each subtask, we label a subset of McMarket using an LLM and further evaluate the quality of the annotations via human assessment. We then conduct experiments to benchmark our dataset, using models ranging from traditional lexical models to LLMs in both single-market and cross-market scenarios across McMarket and the corresponding LLM subset. Results show that incorporating cross-market information significantly enhances performance in both tasks.

A Comparative Analysis of Faithfulness Metrics and Humans in Citation Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) often generate content with unsupported or unverifiable content, known as "hallucinations." To address this, retrieval-augmented LLMs are employed to include citations in their content, grounding the content in verifiable sources. Despite such developments, manually assessing how well a citation supports the associated statement remains a major challenge. Previous studies tackle this challenge by leveraging faithfulness metrics to estimate citation support automatically. However, they limit this citation support estimation to a binary classification scenario, neglecting fine-grained citation support in practical scenarios. To investigate the effectiveness of faithfulness metrics in fine-grained scenarios, we propose a comparative evaluation framework that assesses the metric effectiveness in distinguishing citations between three-category support levels: full, partial, and no support. Our framework employs correlation analysis, classification evaluation, and retrieval evaluation to measure the alignment between metric scores and human judgments comprehensively. Our results indicate no single metric consistently excels across all evaluations, highlighting the complexity of accurately evaluating fine-grained support levels. Particularly, we find that the best-performing metrics struggle to distinguish partial support from full or no support. Based on these findings, we provide practical recommendations for developing more effective metrics.

Rotatable Block-Controlled RIS: Bridging the Performance Gap to Element-Controlled Systems

The passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) requires numerous elements to achieve adequate array gain, which linearly increases power consumption (PC) with the number of reflection phases. To address this, this letter introduces a rotatable block-controlled RIS (BC-RIS) that preserves spectral efficiency (SE) while reducing power costs. Unlike the element-controlled RIS (EC-RIS), which necessitates independent phase control for each element, the BC-RIS uses a single phase control circuit for each block, substantially lowering power requirements. In the maximum ratio transmission, by customizing specular reflection channels through the rotation of blocks and coherently superimposing signals with optimized reflection phase of blocks, the BC-RIS achieves the same averaged SE as the EC-RIS. To counteract the added power demands from rotation, influenced by block size, we have developed a segmentation scheme to minimize overall PC. Furthermore, constraints for rotation power-related parameters have been established to enhance the energy efficiency of the BC-RIS compared to the EC-RIS. Numerical results confirm that this approach significantly improves energy efficiency while maintaining performance.

MSSP : A Versatile Multi-Scenario Adaptable Intelligent Robot Simulation Platform Based on LIDAR-Inertial Fusion

This letter presents a multi-scenario adaptable intelligent robot simulation platform based on LIDAR-inertial fusion, with three main features: (1 The platform includes an versatile robot model that can be freely controlled through manual control or autonomous tracking. This model is equipped with various types of LIDAR and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), providing ground truth information with absolute accuracy. (2 The platform provides a collection of simulation environments with diverse characteristic information and supports developers in customizing and modifying environments according to their needs. (3 The platform supports evaluation of localization performance for SLAM frameworks. Ground truth with absolute accuracy eliminates the inherent errors of global positioning sensors present in real experiments, facilitating detailed analysis and evaluation of the algorithms. By utilizing the simulation platform, developers can overcome the limitations of real environments and datasets, enabling fine-grained analysis and evaluation of mainstream SLAM algorithms in various environments. Experiments conducted in different environments and with different LIDARs demonstrate the wide applicability and practicality of our simulation platform. The implementation of the simulation platform is open-sourced on Github.

Towards Fine-Grained Citation Evaluation in Generated Text: A Comparative Analysis of Faithfulness Metrics

Large language models (LLMs) often produce unsupported or unverifiable information, known as "hallucinations." To mitigate this, retrieval-augmented LLMs incorporate citations, grounding the content in verifiable sources. Despite such developments, manually assessing how well a citation supports the associated statement remains a major challenge. Previous studies use faithfulness metrics to estimate citation support automatically but are limited to binary classification, overlooking fine-grained citation support in practical scenarios. To investigate the effectiveness of faithfulness metrics in fine-grained scenarios, we propose a comparative evaluation framework that assesses the metric effectiveness in distinguishinging citations between three-category support levels: full, partial, and no support. Our framework employs correlation analysis, classification evaluation, and retrieval evaluation to measure the alignment between metric scores and human judgments comprehensively. Our results show no single metric consistently excels across all evaluations, revealing the complexity of assessing fine-grained support. Based on the findings, we provide practical recommendations for developing more effective metrics.

Sparse MIMO for ISAC: New Opportunities and Challenges

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been a key technology of wireless communications for decades. A typical MIMO system employs antenna arrays with the inter-antenna spacing being half of the signal wavelength, which we term as compact MIMO. Looking forward towards the future sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication networks, MIMO system will achieve even finer spatial resolution to not only enhance the spectral efficiency of wireless communications, but also enable more accurate wireless sensing. To this end, by removing the restriction of half-wavelength antenna spacing, sparse MIMO has been proposed as a new architecture that is able to significantly enlarge the array aperture as compared to conventional compact MIMO with the same number of array elements. In addition, sparse MIMO leads to a new form of virtual MIMO systems for sensing with their virtual apertures considerably larger than physical apertures. As sparse MIMO is expected to be a viable technology for 6G, we provide in this article a comprehensive overview of it, especially focusing on its appealing advantages for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) towards 6G. Specifically, assorted sparse MIMO architectures are first introduced, followed by their new benefits as well as challenges. We then discuss the main design issues of sparse MIMO, including beam pattern synthesis, signal processing, grating lobe suppression, beam codebook design, and array geometry optimization. Last, we provide numerical results to evaluate the performance of sparse MIMO for ISAC and point out promising directions for future research.

FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture

Food is a rich and varied dimension of cultural heritage, crucial to both individuals and social groups. To bridge the gap in the literature on the often-overlooked regional diversity in this domain, we introduce FoodieQA, a manually curated, fine-grained image-text dataset capturing the intricate features of food cultures across various regions in China. We evaluate vision-language Models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) on newly collected, unseen food images and corresponding questions. FoodieQA comprises three multiple-choice question-answering tasks where models need to answer questions based on multiple images, a single image, and text-only descriptions, respectively. While LLMs excel at text-based question answering, surpassing human accuracy, the open-sourced VLMs still fall short by 41\% on multi-image and 21\% on single-image VQA tasks, although closed-weights models perform closer to human levels (within 10\%). Our findings highlight that understanding food and its cultural implications remains a challenging and under-explored direction.

CO3: Low-resource Contrastive Co-training for Generative Conversational Query Rewrite

Generative query rewrite generates reconstructed query rewrites using the conversation history while rely heavily on gold rewrite pairs that are expensive to obtain. Recently, few-shot learning is gaining increasing popularity for this task, whereas these methods are sensitive to the inherent noise due to limited data size. Besides, both attempts face performance degradation when there exists language style shift between training and testing cases. To this end, we study low-resource generative conversational query rewrite that is robust to both noise and language style shift. The core idea is to utilize massive unlabeled data to make further improvements via a contrastive co-training paradigm. Specifically, we co-train two dual models (namely Rewriter and Simplifier) such that each of them provides extra guidance through pseudo-labeling for enhancing the other in an iterative manner. We also leverage contrastive learning with data augmentation, which enables our model pay more attention on the truly valuable information than the noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model under both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. We also verify the better generalization ability of our model when encountering language style shift.

On the Multi-turn Instruction Following for Conversational Web Agents

Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in planning and executing multi-step interactions within complex web-based environments, fulfilling a wide range of web navigation tasks. Despite these advancements, the potential for LLM-powered agents to effectively engage with sequential user instructions in real-world scenarios has not been fully explored. In this work, we introduce a new task of Conversational Web Navigation, which necessitates sophisticated interactions that span multiple turns with both the users and the environment, supported by a specially developed dataset named Multi-Turn Mind2Web (MT-Mind2Web). To tackle the limited context length of LLMs and the context-dependency issue of the conversational tasks, we further propose a novel framework, named self-reflective memory-augmented planning (Self-MAP), which employs memory utilization and self-reflection techniques. Extensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the MT-Mind2Web dataset, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.