Papers by David M. Chan
Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that VLAs can recognize, interpret, and respond to false-premise instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that detects when an instruction cannot be executed due to a false premise and engages in language-based clarification or correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects when an instruction cannot be executed due to a false premise and engages in language-based clarification or correction. |
Distribution Aware Metrics for Conditional Natural Language Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics for conditional natural language generation rely on pairwise comparisons between a single generated text and the best-matching reference. |
| Approach: | They propose a family of meta-metrics that build on existing pairwise distance functions to evaluate conditional natural language generation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates the ability of a model to generate text matching diversity in references in visual description and summarization. |
Multi-Stage Multi-Modal Pre-Training for Automatic Speech Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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Yash Jain, David M. Chan, Pranav Dheram, Aparna Khare, Olabanji Shonibare, Venkatesh Ravichandran, Shalini Ghosh
| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-training for automatic speech recognition (ASR) focus on single-stage pre-train followed by fine-tuning on downstream task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal pre-training method that combines unsupervised pre-training with translation-based supervised mid-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves WERs by 38.45% over baselines on both Librispeech and SUPERB. |
Puzzled by Puzzles: When Vision-Language Models Can’t Take a Hint (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | rebus puzzles encode language through imagery, spatial arrangement, and symbolic substitution. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark of rebus puzzles in english language to test their ability to interpret and solve them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on a set of english-language rebus puzzles. |
Enough Coin Flips Can Make LLMs Act Bayesian (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit the ability to generalize given few-shot examples in their input prompt, an emergent capability known as in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether large language models use in-context learning to generalize given few-shot examples in their input prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize given few-shot examples in their input prompt, an emergent capability known as in-context learning. |