Hao (Peter) Yu

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal innovation in natural language processing, enhancing generative models by incorporating external information retrieval. Evaluating RAG systems, however, poses distinct challenges due to their hybrid structure and reliance on dynamic knowledge sources. We consequently enhanced an extensive survey and proposed an analysis framework for benchmarks of RAG systems, RAGR (Retrieval, Generation, Additional Requirement), designed to systematically analyze RAG benchmarks by focusing on measurable outputs and established truths. Specifically, we scrutinize and contrast multiple quantifiable metrics of the Retrieval and Generation component, such as relevance, accuracy, and faithfulness, of the internal links within the current RAG evaluation methods, covering the possible output and ground truth pairs. We also analyze the integration of additional requirements of different works, discuss the limitations of current benchmarks, and propose potential directions for further research to address these shortcomings and advance the field of RAG evaluation. In conclusion, this paper collates the challenges associated with RAG evaluation. It presents a thorough analysis and examination of existing methodologies for RAG benchmark design based on the proposed RGAR framework.

This paper develops an agent-based automated fact-checking approach for detecting misinformation. We demonstrate that combining a powerful LLM agent, which does not have access to the internet for searches, with an online web search agent yields better results than when each tool is used independently. Our approach is robust across multiple models, outperforming alternatives and increasing the macro F1 of misinformation detection by as much as 20 percent compared to LLMs without search. We also conduct extensive analyses on the sources our system leverages and their biases, decisions in the construction of the system like the search tool and the knowledge base, the type of evidence needed and its impact on the results, and other parts of the overall process. By combining strong performance with in-depth understanding, we hope to provide building blocks for future search-enabled misinformation mitigation systems.

In this work, we propose a weak supervision pipeline SWEET: Supervise Weakly for Entity Extraction to fight Trafficking for extracting person names from noisy escort advertisements. Our method combines the simplicity of rule-matching (through antirules, i.e., negated rules) and the generalizability of large language models fine-tuned on benchmark, domain-specific and synthetic datasets, treating them as weak labels. One of the major challenges in this domain is limited labeled data. SWEET addresses this by obtaining multiple weak labels through labeling functions and effectively aggregating them. SWEET outperforms the previous supervised SOTA method for this task by 9% F1 score on domain data and better generalizes to common benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we also release HTGEN, a synthetically generated dataset of escort advertisements (built using ChatGPT) to facilitate further research within the community.