# MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering

Source: [MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6e801e209131cea4060c>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T00:59:52.182Z

Authors: Haritz Puerto, G\\"ozde G\\"ul \\c{S}ahin, Iryna Gurevych

Published: 2021-12-03T14:05:52.000Z

## Abstract

The recent explosion of question answering (QA) datasets and models has increased the interest in the generalization of models across multiple domains and formats by either training on multiple datasets or by combining multiple models. Despite the promising results of multi-dataset models, some domains or QA formats may require specific architectures, and thus the adaptability of these models might be limited. In addition, current approaches for combining models disregard cues such as question-answer compatibility. In this work, we propose to combine expert agents with a novel, flexible, and training-efficient architecture that considers questions, answer predictions, and answer-prediction confidence scores to select the best answer among a list of answer candidates. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments we show that our model i) creates a collaboration between agents that outperforms previous multi-agent and multi-dataset approaches in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, ii) is highly data-efficient to train, and iii) can be adapted to any QA format. We release our code and a dataset of answer predictions from expert agents for 16 QA datasets to foster future developments of multi-agent systems on https://github.com/UKPLab/MetaQA.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01922>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.01922.pdf>)
