Akari Asai

See my full publications at the publication page!

1. DR Tulu: Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Rubrics for Deep Research

   Rulin Shao* ,  Akari Asai* ,  Shannon Zejiang Shen* ,  Hamish Ivison* ,  Varsha Kishore , and 16 more authors

   2025

   Preprint

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2. OpenScholar: Synthesizing Scientific Literature with Retrieval-Augmented LMs

   Akari Asai ,  Jacqueline He ,  Rulin Shao ,  Weijia Shi ,  Amanpreet Singh , and 20 more authors

   Preprint (Under Review), 2025

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3. Scaling Retrieval-Based Language Models with a Trillion-Token Datastore

   Rulin Shao ,  Jacqueline He ,  Akari Asai ,  Weijia Shi ,  Tim Dettmers , and 3 more authors

   In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) , 2024

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4. Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Editing for Language Models

   Abhika Mishra ,  Akari Asai ,  Yizhong Wang ,  Vidhisha Balachandran ,  Graham Neubig , and 2 more authors

   In Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) , 2024

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   Large language models (LMs) are prone to generate diverse factually incorrect statements, which are widely called hallucinations. Current approaches predominantly focus on coarse-grained automatic hallucination detection or editing, overlooking nuanced error levels. In this paper, we propose a novel task – automatic fine-grained hallucination detection – and present a comprehensive taxonomy encompassing six hierarchically defined types of hallucination. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce a new benchmark that includes fine-grained human judgments on two LM outputs across various domains. Our analysis reveals that ChatGPT and Llama 2-Chat exhibit hallucinations in 60% and 75% of their outputs, respectively, and a majority of these hallucinations fall into categories that have been underexplored. As an initial step to address this, we train FAVA, a retrieval-augmented LM by carefully designing synthetic data generations to detect and correct fine-grained hallucinations. On our benchmark, our automatic and human evaluations show that FAVA significantly outperforms ChatGPT on fine-grained hallucination detection by a large margin though a large room for future improvement still exists. FAVA’s suggested edits also improve the factuality of LM-generated text, resulting in 5-10% FActScore improvements.

5. Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection

   Akari Asai ,  Zeqiu Wu ,  Yizhong Wang ,  Avirup Sil ,  and  Hannaneh Hajishirzi

   In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR; Oral, Top 1%) , 2024

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   Despite their remarkable capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often produce responses containing factual inaccuracies due to their sole reliance on the parametric knowledge they encapsulate. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), an ad hoc approach that augments LMs with retrieval of relevant knowledge, decreases such issues. However, indiscriminately retrieving and incorporating a fixed number of retrieved passages, regardless of whether retrieval is necessary, or passages are relevant, diminishes LM versatility or can lead to unhelpful response generation. We introduce a new framework called Self-Reflective Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Self-RAG) that enhances an LM’s quality and factuality through retrieval and self-reflection. Our framework trains a single arbitrary LM that adaptively retrieves passages on-demand, and generates and reflects on retrieved passages and its own generations using special tokens, called reflection tokens. Generating reflection tokens makes the LM controllable during the inference phase, enabling it to tailor its behavior to diverse task requirements. Experiments show that Self-RAG (7B and 13B parameters) significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs and retrieval-augmented models on a diverse set of tasks. Specifically, Self-RAG outperforms ChatGPT and retrieval-augmented Llama2-chat on Open-domain QA, reasoning and fact verification tasks, and it shows significant gains in improving factuality and citation accuracy for long-form generations relative to these models.

6. Reliable, Adaptable, and Attributable Language Models with Retrieval

   Akari Asai ,  Zexuan Zhong ,  Danqi Chen ,  Pang Wei Koh ,  Luke Zettlemoyer , and 2 more authors

   arXiv preprint, 2024

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   Parametric language models (LMs), which are trained on vast amounts of web data, exhibit remarkable flexibility and capability. However, they still face practical challenges such as hallucinations, difficulty in adapting to new data distributions, and a lack of verifiability. In this position paper, we advocate for retrieval-augmented LMs to replace parametric LMs as the next generation of LMs. By incorporating large-scale datastores during inference, retrieval-augmented LMs can be more reliable, adaptable, and attributable. Despite their potential, retrieval-augmented LMs have yet to be widely adopted due to several obstacles: specifically, current retrieval-augmented LMs struggle to leverage helpful text beyond knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering, have limited interaction between retrieval and LM components, and lack the infrastructure for scaling. To address these, we propose a roadmap for developing general-purpose retrieval-augmented LMs. This involves a reconsideration of datastores and retrievers, the exploration of pipelines with improved retriever-LM interaction, and significant investment in infrastructure for efficient training and inference.

7. When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories

   Alex Mallen* ,  Akari Asai* ,  Victor Zhong ,  Rajarshi Das ,  Daniel Khashabi , and 1 more author

   In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL; Oral, Best Video Paper Award – Most Viewed) , 2023

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   Despite their impressive performance on diverse tasks, large language models (LMs) still struggle with tasks requiring rich world knowledge, implying the difficulty of encoding a wealth of world knowledge in their parameters. This paper aims to understand LMs’ strengths and limitations in memorizing factual knowledge, by conducting large-scale knowledge probing experiments on two open-domain entity-centric QA datasets: PopQA, our new dataset with 14k questions about long-tail entities, and EntityQuestions, a widely used open-domain QA dataset. We find that LMs struggle with less popular factual knowledge, and that retrieval augmentation helps significantly in these cases. Scaling, on the other hand, mainly improves memorization of popular knowledge, and fails to appreciably improve memorization of factual knowledge in the tail. Based on those findings, we devise a new method for retrieval-augmentation that improves performance and reduces inference costs by only retrieving non-parametric memories when necessary.

8. Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions

   Akari Asai ,  Timo Schick ,  Patrick Lewis ,  Xilun Chen ,  Gautier Izacard , and 3 more authors

   In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Spotlight) , 2023

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   We study the problem of retrieval with instructions, where users of a retrieval system explicitly describe their intent along with their queries. We aim to develop a general-purpose task-aware retrieval system using multi-task instruction tuning, which can follow human-written instructions to find the best documents for a given query. We introduce the first large-scale collection of approximately 40 retrieval datasets with instructions, BERRI, and present TART, a multi-task retrieval system trained on BERRI with instructions. TART shows strong capabilities to adapt to a new retrieval task via instructions and advances the state of the art on two zero-shot retrieval benchmarks, BEIR and LOTTE, outperforming models up to three times larger. We further introduce a new evaluation setup, X^2-Retrieval to better reflect real-world scenarios, where diverse domains and tasks are pooled and a system needs to find documents aligning users’ intents. In this setup, TART significantly outperforms competitive baselines, further demonstrating the effectiveness of guiding retrieval with instructions.

9. Evidentiality-guided Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks

   Akari Asai ,  Matt Gardner ,  and  Hannaneh Hajishirzi

   In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL; Oral) , 2022

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   Retrieval-augmented generation models have shown state-of-the-art performance across many knowledge-intensive NLP tasks such as open-domain question answering and fact verification. These models are trained to generate a final output given retrieved passages that can be irrelevant to an input query, leading to learning spurious cues or memorization. This work introduces a method to incorporate \textitevidentiality of passages—whether a passage contains correct evidence to support the output—into training the generator. We introduce a multi-task learning framework to jointly generate the final output and predict the \textitevidentiality of each passage. Furthermore, we introduce a new task-agnostic method for obtaining high-quality \textitsilver evidentiality labels, addressing the issues of gold evidentiality labels being unavailable in most domains. Our experiments on five datasets across three knowledge-intensive tasks show that our new evidentiality-guided generator significantly outperforms its direct counterpart on all of them, and advances the state of the art on three of them. Our analysis shows that multi-task learning and silver evidentiality mining play key roles. Our code is available at \urlhttps://github.com/AkariAsai/evidentiality_qa

10. One Question Answering Model for Many Languages with Cross-lingual Dense Passage Retrieval

    Akari Asai ,  Xinyan Yu ,  Jungo Kasai ,  and  Hanna Hajishirzi

    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) , 2021

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    We present Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Answer Generation (CORA), the first unified many-to-many question answering (QA) model that can answer questions across many languages, even for ones without language-specific annotated data or knowledge sources.We introduce a new dense passage retrieval algorithm that is trained to retrieve documents across languages for a question.Combined with a multilingual autoregressive generation model, CORA answers directly in the target language without any translation or in-language retrieval modules as used in prior work. We propose an iterative training method that automatically extends annotated data available only in high-resource languages to low-resource ones. Our results show that CORA substantially outperforms the previous state of the art on multilingual open QA benchmarks across 26 languages, 9 of which are unseen during training. Our analyses show the significance of cross-lingual retrieval and generation in many languages, particularly under low-resource settings.

11. XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering

    Akari Asai ,  Jungo Kasai ,  Jonathan Clark ,  Kenton Lee ,  Eunsol Choi , and 1 more author

    In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL; Oral) , 2021

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    Multilingual question answering tasks typically assume that answers exist in the same language as the question. Yet in practice, many languages face both information scarcity—where languages have few reference articles—and information asymmetry—where questions reference concepts from other cultures. This work extends open-retrieval question answering to a cross-lingual setting enabling questions from one language to be answered via answer content from another language. We construct a large-scale dataset built on 40K information-seeking questions across 7 diverse non-English languages that TyDi QA could not find same-language answers for. Based on this dataset, we introduce a task framework, called Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering (XOR QA), that consists of three new tasks involving cross-lingual document retrieval from multilingual and English resources. We establish baselines with state-of-the-art machine translation systems and cross-lingual pretrained models. Experimental results suggest that XOR QA is a challenging task that will facilitate the development of novel techniques for multilingual question answering. Our data and code are available at https://nlp.cs.washington.edu/xorqa/.

12. LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attention

    Ikuya Yamada ,  Akari Asai ,  Hiroyuki Shindo ,  Hideaki Takeda ,  and  Yuji Matsumoto

    In Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) , 2020

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    Entity representations are useful in natural language tasks involving entities. In this paper, we propose new pretrained contextualized representations of words and entities based on the bidirectional transformer. The proposed model treats words and entities in a given text as independent tokens, and outputs contextualized representations of them. Our model is trained using a new pretraining task based on the masked language model of BERT. The task involves predicting randomly masked words and entities in a large entity-annotated corpus retrieved from Wikipedia. We also propose an entity-aware self-attention mechanism that is an extension of the self-attention mechanism of the transformer, and considers the types of tokens (words or entities) when computing attention scores. The proposed model achieves impressive empirical performance on a wide range of entity-related tasks. In particular, it obtains state-of-the-art results on five well-known datasets: Open Entity (entity typing), TACRED (relation classification), CoNLL-2003 (named entity recognition), ReCoRD (cloze-style question answering), and SQuAD 1.1 (extractive question answering). Our source code and pretrained representations are available at this https URL.

13. Learning to retrieve reasoning paths over wikipedia graph for question answering

    Akari Asai ,  Kazuma Hashimoto ,  Hannaneh Hajishirzi ,  Richard Socher ,  and  Caiming Xiong

    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) , 2020

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    Answering questions that require multi-hop reasoning at web-scale necessitates retrieving multiple evidence documents, one of which often has little lexical or semantic relationship to the question. This paper introduces a new graph-based recurrent retrieval approach that learns to retrieve reasoning paths over the Wikipedia graph to answer multi-hop open-domain questions. Our retriever model trains a recurrent neural network that learns to sequentially retrieve evidence paragraphs in the reasoning path by conditioning on the previously retrieved documents. Our reader model ranks the reasoning paths and extracts the answer span included in the best reasoning path. Experimental results show state-of-the-art results in three open-domain QA datasets, showcasing the effectiveness and robustness of our method. Notably, our method achieves significant improvement in HotpotQA, outperforming the previous best model by more than 14 points.