Papers by Daniel McDuff
NICE: Neural Image Commenting with Empathy (2021.findings-emnlp)
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Kezhen Chen, Qiuyuan Huang, Daniel McDuff, Xiang Gao, Hamid Palangi, Jianfeng Wang, Kenneth Forbus, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Emotion and empathy are examples of human qualities lacking in many human-machine interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate images with human-generated comments with enhanced emotion and empathy while minimizing inappropriate or offensive outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more human-like and engaging image comments on two images with human-generated comments and human annotations while minimizing inappropriate or offensive outputs. |
Substance over Style: Evaluating Proactive Conversational Coaching Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Vidya Srinivas, Xuhai Xu, Xin Liu, Kumar Ayush, Isaac Galatzer-Levy, Shwetak Patel, Daniel McDuff, Tim Althoff
| Challenge: | Recent NLP research has focused on single-turn tasks with well-defined objectives or evaluation criteria. |
| Approach: | They describe five multi-turn coaching agents that exhibit distinct conversational styles and evaluate them through a user study. |
| Outcome: | The authors compare user feedback with third-person evaluations from health experts and an LM to find that stylistic components in absence of core functionality are viewed negatively. |
Logical Transformers: Infusing Logical Structures into Pre-Trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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Borui Wang, Qiuyuan Huang, Budhaditya Deb, Aaron Halfaker, Liqun Shao, Daniel McDuff, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Dragomir Radev, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models that ignore the logical structures underlying natural language text often lack the ability to capture and encode key logical information in the input sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct logic-aware input embeddings for transformer language models through logic detection, logic mapping and hierarchical logical projections and then develop a new modeling paradigm that can upgrade existing transformer language model into logical transformers to boost their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve superior performance on four important and challenging tasks. |
BehaviorSFT: Behavioral Token Conditioning for Health Agents Across the Proactivity Spectrum (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yubin Kim, Zhiyuan Hu, Hyewon Jeong, Eugene W Park, Shuyue Stella Li, Chanwoo Park, Shiyun Xiong, MingYu Lu, Hyeonhoon Lee, Xin Liu, Daniel McDuff, Cynthia Breazeal, Samir Tulebaev, Hae Won Park
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with proactive engagement, authors say . a blind clinical evaluation confirmed that trained agents exhibit more realistic clinical behavior . |
| Approach: | They propose a training strategy using behavioral tokens to explicitly condition LLMs for dynamic behavioral selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy boosts performance on both benchmarks. |
What Are the Odds? Language Models Are Capable of Probabilistic Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Akshay Paruchuri, Jake Garrison, Shun Liao, John Hernandez, Jacob Sunshine, Tim Althoff, Xin Liu, Daniel McDuff
| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) are capable of remarkably complex linguistic tasks, but numerical reasoning is an area in which they struggle. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of language models using idealized and real-world statistical distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make inferences about distributions, even if assumptions are incorrect or misspecified. |