Papers by Ali Farhadi
Real-Time Open-Domain Question Answering with Dense-Sparse Phrase Index (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain question answering models require multiple documents on-demand for every input query. |
| Approach: | They propose query-agnostic indexable representations of document phrases that can drastically speed up open-domain question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained and deployed even in a single 4-GPU server. |
Phrase-Indexed Question Answering: A New Challenge for Scalable Document Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing QA models rely on learning interaction between document and question . current models require explicit attention to the document before or as it reads it . |
| Approach: | They propose a modular question answering task that enforces complete independence of the document encoder from the question encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves reasonable accuracy but significantly underperforms unconstrained QA models. |
Probing Contextual Language Models for Common Ground with Visual Representations (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Contextual language models have attracted great interest in probing what is encoded in their representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a probing model that evaluates how effective are text-only representations in distinguishing between matching and non-matching visual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms text-only language models in instance retrieval, but underperform humans. |
OLMoTrace: Tracing Language Model Outputs Back to Trillions of Training Tokens (2025.acl-demo)
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Jiacheng Liu, Taylor Blanton, Yanai Elazar, Sewon Min, Yen-Sung Chen, Arnavi Chheda-Kothary, Huy Tran, Byron Bischoff, Eric Marsh, Michael Schmitz, Cassidy Trier, Aaron Sarnat, Jenna James, Jon Borchardt, Bailey Kuehl, Evie Yu-Yen Cheng, Karen Farley, Taira Anderson, David Albright, Carissa Schoenick, Luca Soldaini, Dirk Groeneveld, Rock Yuren Pang, Pang Wei Koh, Noah A. Smith, Sophie Lebrecht, Yejin Choi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ali Farhadi, Jesse Dodge
| Challenge: | tracing language models' outputs back to training data is a problem because they are trained on text corpora with trillions of tokens . existing methods for tracers have not been scaled to work within this multi-trillion-token setting . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that traces language models' outputs verbatim back to training data . OLMOTRACE retrieves documents from the model's training data that contain exact matches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can find verbatim matches between LM output and training data . it can be used to explore fact checking, hallucination, and creativity of language models . |
HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence? (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing commonsense models struggle to perform inferences that are trivial for humans, but are often misclassified by state-of-the-art models. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that is adversarial to state-of-the-art commonsense reasoning and use it to build a model that is surprisingly robust. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is compared with existing models and scaled up towards a critical 'Goldilocks zone' wherein generated text is ridiculous to humans, yet often misclassified by state-of-the-art models. |
Iconary: A Pictionary-Based Game for Testing Multimodal Communication with Drawings and Text (2021.emnlp-main)
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Christopher Clark, Jordi Salvador, Dustin Schwenk, Derrick Bonafilia, Mark Yatskar, Eric Kolve, Alvaro Herrasti, Jonghyun Choi, Sachin Mehta, Sam Skjonsberg, Carissa Schoenick, Aaron Sarnat, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Oren Etzioni, Ali Farhadi
| Challenge: | Communicating with humans is challenging for AIs because of its complexity and multimodality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a game of drawing and guessing based on Pictionary to test AIs' understanding of the world and multi-modal gestures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game is a test for mixing language and visual/symbolic communication in AI. |
TuringAdvice: A Generative and Dynamic Evaluation of Language Use (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that today’s language models struggle at TuringAdvice . language models are getting ever-larger, and are being trained on ever-increasing quantities of text . |
| Approach: | They propose a task task that requires models to generate helpful advice in natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms even multibillion parameter models on 600k in-domain training examples. |
PIGLeT: Language Grounding Through Neuro-Symbolic Interaction in a 3D World (2021.acl-long)
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Rowan Zellers, Ari Holtzman, Matthew Peters, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Ali Farhadi, Yejin Choi
| Challenge: | PIGLeT model learns physical commonsense knowledge through interaction, then uses this knowledge to ground language. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that learns physical commonsense knowledge through interaction . they factorize PIGLeT into a physical dynamics model and a separate language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a 100x larger, text-to-text approach in forecasting language . it can read a sentence, simulate neurally what might happen next, and communicate that result through a literal symbolic representation, or natural language. |
SHARCS: Efficient Transformers Through Routing with Dynamic Width Sub-networks (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Several methods have been proposed to improve the inference efficiency of transformer-based models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new adaptive inference method that takes into account the hardness of input samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or complements existing per-sample adaptive inference methods in terms of accuracy vs. FLOPs and can be applied to compressed and efficient transformer encoders to further improve their efficiency. |
Exposing the Limits of Video-Text Models through Contrast Sets (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent video-text models can retrieve relevant videos based on text with high accuracy, but to what extent do they comprehend the semantics of the text? |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that probes video-text models with hard negatives . they leverage a pre-trained language model and a set of heuristics to create verb and person entity focused contrast sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework erases the performance gap between CLIP-based methods and the earlier methods. |