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Allies: Prompting Large Language Model with Beam Search

24 May 2023arXiv:2305.14766archive 2025-07-28

Hao Sun, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Yan Zhang, Daxin Jiang, Linjun Yang, Nan Duan

With the advance of large language models (LLMs), the research field of LLM applications becomes more and more popular and the idea of constructing pipelines to accomplish complex tasks by stacking LLM API calls come true. However, this kind of methods face two limitations: narrow information coverage and low fault tolerance. In this work, we propose a novel method called ALLIES. Given an input query, ALLIES leverages LLMs to iteratively generate new queries related to the original query, enabling an iterative reasoning process. By iteratively refining and expanding the scope of the original query, ALLIES captures and utilizes hidden knowledge that may not be directly obtainable through retrieval. We take zero-shot open-domain question answering (ODQA) as an application scene and evaluate ALLIES on the widely-used benchmarks, such as NQ, WebQ and TriviaQA. The experimental results demonstrate that ALLIES significantly outperforms other zero-shot baselines, indicating its effectiveness in tackling those challenges. Our code is available in https://github.com/microsoft/SimXNS/tree/main/ALLIES.

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microsoft/simxns officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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readfiles microsoft/simxns/ALLIES/utils.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · ed1a7cdd6a385a75 · report
answer_with_gen microsoft/simxns/ALLIES/tools.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 7d94e4547cbd3c27 · report
embed_passages microsoft/simxns/CAPSTONE/models/co_training_generate_new_train_wiki.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 9ae939ed24cee1da · report
extract_floats_from_string microsoft/simxns/ALLIES/tools.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 860e0ecfd5d3c0c9 · report
gen_background microsoft/simxns/ALLIES/tools.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · bb95e483083da720 · report
generate microsoft/simxns/CAPSTONE/models/generate_query.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 316ed99ac8be6d85 · report
get_question_embeddings microsoft/simxns/ALLIES/retrieval_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 26455f41307d3f5c · report
load_data microsoft/simxns/CAPSTONE/models/generate_query.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 3d84e929685d7198 · report
load_states_from_checkpoint microsoft/simxns/ALLIES/retrieval_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 4ee31e53b22a4487 · report
load_tf_weights_in_bert microsoft/simxns/ALLIES/modeling_bert.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · d009b630f4496e64 · report
reform_out microsoft/simxns/CAPSTONE/models/co_training_generate_new_train_wiki.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · b3b424db5be9b55c · report
retrieval microsoft/simxns/ALLIES/utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · e6b0e72e41150f0f · report
sparse_retrieval microsoft/simxns/ALLIES/utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 314a75c29803d7fd · report

Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelOpen-Domain Question AnsweringQuestion AnsweringRetrievalTriviaQA

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