We equip a smaller Language Model to generalise to answering challenging compositional questions that have not been seen in training. To do so we propose a combination of multitask supervised pretraining on up to 93 tasks designed to instill diverse reasoning abilities, and a dense retrieval system that aims to retrieve a set of evidential paragraph fragments. Recent progress in question-answering has been achieved either through prompting methods against very large pretrained Language Models in zero or few-shot fashion, or by fine-tuning smaller models, sometimes in conjunction with information retrieval. We focus on the less explored question of the extent to which zero-shot generalisation can be enabled in smaller models with retrieval against a corpus within which sufficient information to answer a particular question may not exist. We establish strong baselines in this setting for diverse evaluation datasets (StrategyQA, CommonsenseQA, IIRC, DROP, Musique and ARC-DA), and show that performance can be significantly improved by adding retrieval-augmented training datasets which are designed to expose our models to a variety of heuristic reasoning strategies such as weighing partial evidence or ignoring an irrelevant context.

我们在本文中提出了一种通过多任务监督预训练和密集检索系统的组合来实现对具有挑战性的复合问题的泛化的方法，并且展示了通过添加用于训练的检索增强数据集可以显著提高模型的性能。

教小型语言模型如何推广到未见过的组合问题