Papers › Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension

Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension

5 Nov 2016arXiv:1611.01603archive 2025-07-28

Minjoon Seo, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Ali Farhadi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Machine comprehension (MC), answering a query about a given context paragraph, requires modeling complex interactions between the context and the query. Recently, attention mechanisms have been successfully extended to MC. Typically these methods use attention to focus on a small portion of the context and summarize it with a fixed-size vector, couple attentions temporally, and/or often form a uni-directional attention. In this paper we introduce the Bi-Directional Attention Flow (BIDAF) network, a multi-stage hierarchical process that represents the context at different levels of granularity and uses bi-directional attention flow mechanism to obtain a query-aware context representation without early summarization. Our experimental evaluations show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results in Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and CNN/DailyMail cloze test.

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Code

Syntology Ran 8 of 11 code samples harvested from 5 repositories linked to this paper; 3 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 2 ran · violated contract; 5 ran · our draft was wrong.

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27 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

allenai/bi-att-flow officialmentioned on GitHubtf report
Deepak-Work/Passage_Retrieval mentioned on GitHubtf report
GauthierDmn/question_answering mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
WarruzuEndo/BiDAF_mindspore mentioned on GitHubmindspore report
baidu/DuReader mentioned on GitHubtf report
davidgolub/QuestionGeneration mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
dsouzadaniel/BiDAF mentioned on GitHubpytorchGPL-3.0 report
galsang/BiDAF-pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
ghus75/Question_Answering mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
kokikwbt/deepsect mentioned on GitHub report
lmn-extracts/dcn_plus mentioned on GitHubtf report
minstar/BIDAF mentioned on GitHubtf report
rajatgermany/qa-nlp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
shmsw25/qa-transfer mentioned on GitHubtf report
surekhamedapati/NLPA_NEO mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
suryaiyer/squad-bidaf mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
tikyau/bidaf-quick-test mentioned on GitHubtf report
white127/squad-2.0-bidaf mentioned on GitHubtf report
xiaobaicxy/Bidaf_SQuAD_MC_Pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorchnot reachable when probed 2026-09-18 — repositories for recent papers often appear after camera-ready report

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11 samples harvested; 8 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 3 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · honoured contract
2ran · violated contract
5ran · our draft was wrong
3unverified

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f1_score allenai/bi-att-flow/squad/evaluate-v1.1.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 2112c433b9c6d343 · report
data_from_json lmn-extracts/dcn_plus/question_answering/preprocessing/squad_preprocess.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 40b9eb36720710bb · report
exact_match_score ghus75/Question_Answering/code/evaluate.py community (archive-listed) ran · violated contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f6c275d6a18330a9 · report
gb tikyau/bidaf-quick-test/analyze.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 27e4ebf8000ce768 · report
get_word2vec shmsw25/qa-transfer/squad/prepro.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · a7dd8bca3454ecd5 · report
mask_answer tikyau/bidaf-quick-test/zeroshot/zeroshot2squad.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 5b15515dc2386cc7 · report
normalize_answer ghus75/Question_Answering/code/evaluate.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · c6a80c065d2e4851 · report
parse_no_answers tikyau/bidaf-quick-test/analyze.py community (archive-listed) ran · violated contract no licence file found · pointer only · d8ae123b2848fad9 · report
masked_softmax ghus75/Question_Answering/code/modules.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 591485e987c9ea09 · report
maybe_download lmn-extracts/dcn_plus/question_answering/preprocessing/squad_preprocess.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 4839200676aaf471 · report
reporthook lmn-extracts/dcn_plus/question_answering/preprocessing/squad_preprocess.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 9724d0da37841e48 · report

Tasks

Cloze TestNavigateOpen-Domain Question AnsweringQuestion AnsweringReading Comprehension

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Open-Domain Question Answering Quasar BiDAF EM (Quasar-T) 25.9 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Open-Domain Question Answering Quasar BiDAF F1 (Quasar-T) 28.5 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering CNN / Daily Mail BiDAF CNN 76.9 #4 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering CNN / Daily Mail BiDAF Daily Mail 79.6 #4 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering MS MARCO BiDaF Baseline BLEU-1 10.64 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering MS MARCO BiDaF Baseline Rouge-L 23.96 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA BiDAF BLEU-1 33.45 #8 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA BiDAF BLEU-4 15.69 #8 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA BiDAF METEOR 15.68 #8 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering NarrativeQA BiDAF Rouge-L 36.74 #8 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 BiDAF (ensemble) EM 73.744 #134 of 213 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 BiDAF (ensemble) F1 81.525 #134 of 213 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 BiDAF (single model) EM 67.974 #170 of 213 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 BiDAF (single model) F1 77.323 #170 of 213 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 dev BIDAF (single) EM 67.7 #41 of 55 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering SQuAD1.1 dev BIDAF (single) F1 77.3 #41 of 55 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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