Papers › cTBLS: Augmenting Large Language Models with Conversational Tables

cTBLS: Augmenting Large Language Models with Conversational Tables

21 Mar 2023arXiv:2303.12024archive 2025-07-28

Anirudh S Sundar, Larry Heck

Optimizing accuracy and performance while eliminating hallucinations of open-domain conversational large language models (LLMs) is an open research challenge. A particularly promising direction is to augment and ground LLMs with information from structured sources. This paper introduces Conversational Tables (cTBLS), a three-step architecture to retrieve and generate dialogue responses grounded on retrieved tabular information. cTBLS uses Transformer encoder embeddings for Dense Table Retrieval and obtains up to 125% relative improvement over the retriever in the previous state-of-the-art system on the HyrbiDialogue dataset. cTBLS then uses a shared process between encoder and decoder models to perform a coarse+fine tabular knowledge (e.g., cell) ranking combined with a GPT-3.5 LLM response generator to yield a 2x relative improvement in ROUGE scores. Finally, human evaluators prefer cTBLs +80% of the time (coherency, fluency) and judge informativeness to be 4x better than the previous state-of-the-art.

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DecoderInformativenessResponse GenerationRetrievalTable Retrieval

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight Decay

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