Bridging Information Gaps with Comprehensive Answers: Improving the Diversity and Informativeness of Follow-Up Questions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Generating diverse follow-up questions that uncover missing information remains challenging for conversational agents, particularly when they run on small, locally hosted models.To address this, we develop an informationgap-driven knowledge distillation pipeline 1 in which a teacher LLM generates a comprehensive answer, contrasts it with the initial answer to identify information gaps, and formulates gap-bridging follow-up questions.Using this pipeline, we augment the existing FOLLOWUPQG dataset tenfold.We then finetune smaller student models on the augmented dataset to distill the teacher's knowledge.Experiments with selected teacher-student model pairs show that fine-tuned students achieve significantly higher informativeness and diversity than variations trained on the original dataset.These findings indicate that our pipeline, which mirrors the human cognitive process of information seeking, provides an efficient distillation channel from state-of-the-art LLMs to smaller models, enabling resource-constrained conversational systems to generate more diverse and informative follow-up questions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".