Papers by Ameet Deshpande
QualEval: Qualitative Evaluation for Model Improvement (2024.naacl-long)
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Vishvak Murahari, Ameet Deshpande, Peter Clark, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashish Sabharwal, Karthik Narasimhan, Ashwin Kalyan
| Challenge: | Quantitative evaluation metrics are inadequate for large language models due to complexity of tasks and cannot provide actionable diagnostics. |
| Approach: | They propose a quantitative evaluation tool called QualEval that uses automated qualitative evaluation as a vehicle for model improvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the Llama 2 model by 15% compared to baselines. |
When is BERT Multilingual? Isolating Crucial Ingredients for Cross-lingual Transfer (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on multilingual language models has demonstrated their capacity for cross-lingual zero-shot transfer on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They conduct a large-scale empirical study to isolate the effects of various linguistic properties by measuring zero-shot transfer between four different natural languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits decent cross-lingual zero-shot transfer, with no significant differences in word order and embedding alignment. |
MUX-PLMs: Data Multiplexing for High-throughput Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Vishvak Murahari, Ameet Deshpande, Carlos Jimenez, Izhak Shafran, Mingqiu Wang, Yuan Cao, Karthik Narasimhan
| Challenge: | MUX-PLMs are high-throughput pre-trained language models that can be fine-tuned for any downstream task to yield high-performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to train language models with data multiplexing to achieve 2x/5x inference speedup . they use multiplexers to entangle and disentangle inputs to achieve the same performance . |
| Outcome: | MUX-PLMs achieve 2x/5x inference speedup with 1-4 % drop on broad suite of tasks. |
Language Models can Subtly Deceive Without Lying: A Case Study on Strategic Phrasing in Legislation (2025.acl-long)
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Atharvan Dogra, Krishna Pillutla, Ameet Deshpande, Ananya B. Sai, John J Nay, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Balaraman Ravindran
| Challenge: | blatant lying or unintentional hallucination are common in large language models. |
| Approach: | They build a testbed mimicking a legislative environment where a corporate lobbyist module is proposing amendments to bills that benefit a specific company while evading identification by strong LLM detectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to detect deception in legislative environments and to optimize its phrasing to avoid detection by strong detectors. |
Toxicity in chatgpt: Analyzing persona-assigned language models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible capabilities and transcended the natural language processing community. |
| Approach: | They evaluate toxicity in over half a million generations of ChatGPT by assigning it a persona . they find that outputs engage in incorrect stereotypes, harmful dialogue, hurtful opinions . |
| Outcome: | a new study shows that assigning a persona to a chatbot can increase toxicity in half a million generations. |
Guiding Attention for Self-Supervised Learning with Transformers (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that self-attention patterns in trained models contain a majority of non-linguistic regularities. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to allow efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers by using an auxiliary loss function to guide attention heads to conform to such patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art in low-resource settings and is agnostic to pre-training objectives. |
InstructEval: Systematic Evaluation of Instruction Selection Methods (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) performs tasks by prompting a large language model using an instruction and a small set of annotated examples. |
| Approach: | They develop an ICL evaluation suite to evaluate the performance of popular instruction selection methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation suite compares instruction selection methods over five metrics relevant to ICL. |
PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Vinay Samuel, Henry Peng Zou, Yue Zhou, Shreyas Chaudhari, Ashwin Kalyan, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ameet Deshpande, Karthik R Narasimhan, Vishvak Murahari
| Challenge: | Persona agents are LLM agents conditioned to act according to an assigned persona . evaluating how faithfully these agents adhere to their personas remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | a new study evaluates persona agents' ability to act according to an assigned persona . a persona agent's person score is a human-aligned automatic metric that can be used to evaluate a model . |
| Outcome: | a new evaluation framework and a human-aligned automatic metric show that persona agents can perform better. |
Engagement Undermines Safety: How Stereotypes and Toxicity Shape Humor in Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are increasingly used for creative writing and engagement content, raising safety concerns about their outputs. |
| Approach: | They evaluate how funniness optimization in large language models couples with harmful content by jointly measuring humor, stereotypicality, and toxicity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model couples humor, stereotypicality, and toxicity with harmful outputs . the results suggest a bias amplification loop between generators and evaluators . |
C-STS: Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity (2023.emnlp-main)
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Ameet Deshpande, Carlos Jimenez, Howard Chen, Vishvak Murahari, Victoria Graf, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Danqi Chen, Karthik Narasimhan
| Challenge: | Semantic textual similarity (STS) is a cornerstone task in natural language processing, but it is inherently ambiguous. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called conditional STS which measures similarity conditioned on an aspect elucidated in natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task reduces subjectivity and ambiguity and enables fine-grained similarity evaluation using diverse conditions. |