Papers › FlowQA: Grasping Flow in History for Conversational Machine Comprehension
FlowQA: Grasping Flow in History for Conversational Machine Comprehension
Hsin-Yuan Huang, Eunsol Choi, Wen-tau Yih
Conversational machine comprehension requires the understanding of the conversation history, such as previous question/answer pairs, the document context, and the current question. To enable traditional, single-turn models to encode the history comprehensively, we introduce Flow, a mechanism that can incorporate intermediate representations generated during the process of answering previous questions, through an alternating parallel processing structure. Compared to approaches that concatenate previous questions/answers as input, Flow integrates the latent semantics of the conversation history more deeply. Our model, FlowQA, shows superior performance on two recently proposed conversational challenges (+7.2% F1 on CoQA and +4.0% on QuAC). The effectiveness of Flow also shows in other tasks. By reducing sequential instruction understanding to conversational machine comprehension, FlowQA outperforms the best models on all three domains in SCONE, with +1.8% to +4.4% improvement in accuracy.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question Answering | CoQA | FlowQA (single model) | Out-of-domain | 71.8 | #6 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | CoQA | FlowQA (single model) | Overall | 75.0 | #6 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | QuAC | FlowQA (single model) | F1 | 64.1 | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | QuAC | FlowQA (single model) | HEQD | 5.8 | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | QuAC | FlowQA (single model) | HEQQ | 59.6 | #1 of 2 | 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.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections