Papers by Hamid Palangi
Magnet: Multi-turn Tool-use Data Synthesis and Distillation via Graph Translation (2025.acl-long)
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Fan Yin, Zifeng Wang, I-Hung Hsu, Jun Yan, Ke Jiang, Yanfei Chen, Jindong Gu, Long Le, Kai-Wei Chang, Chen-Yu Lee, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Large language models have been shown to be effective in multi-turn interactions . however, their performance may be limited in complex, multi-turned interactions involving users and multiple tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for synthesizing high-quality training trajectories to enhance the function calling capability of large language model agents in multi-turn conversations with humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model by 68.01 on BFCL-v3 and 73.30 on ToolQuery. |
ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Toxic language detection systems often falsely flag text that contains minority group mentions as toxic . this over-reliance on spurious correlations also causes systems to struggle with detecting implicitly toxic language. |
| Approach: | They develop a machine-generated dataset of toxic and benign statements about 13 minority groups that generates subtly toxic and harmless text with a massive pretrained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect toxic and benign statements on a large scale . it can also detect hate speech on 94.5% of the toxic examples . |
ModelCitizens: Representing Community Voices in Online Safety (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ashima Suvarna, Christina A Chance, Karolina Naranjo, Hamid Palangi, Sophie Hao, Thomas Hartvigsen, Saadia Gabriel
| Challenge: | Existing toxic language detection models are trained on annotations that collapse diverse perspectives into a single ground truth. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment social media posts with conversational scenarios to reflect the impact of conversational context on toxicity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on social media with conversational scenarios. |
Reverse Thinking Makes LLMs Stronger Reasoners (2025.naacl-long)
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Justin Chen, Zifeng Wang, Hamid Palangi, Rujun Han, Sayna Ebrahimi, Long Le, Vincent Perot, Swaroop Mishra, Mohit Bansal, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Reverse-Enhanced Thinking (RevThink) is a framework for large language models to perform reverse thinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing forward-backward reasoning by collecting data from a teacher model and employing three objectives to train a student model in a multi-task learning fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms a fine-tuning method trained on 10x more forward reasoning on 12 datasets covering commonsense, math, and logical reasoning. |
In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Zhen Tan, Jun Yan, I-Hung Hsu, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Long Le, Yiwen Song, Yanfei Chen, Hamid Palangi, George Lee, Anand Rajan Iyer, Tianlong Chen, Huan Liu, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to long-term dialogue memory management fail to capture the natural semantic structure of conversations, leading to fragmented and incomplete representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that integrates forward- and backward-looking reflections into a personalized memory bank for effective future retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on a long-term dialogue memory model. |
PlanGEN: A Multi-Agent Framework for Generating Planning and Reasoning Trajectories for Complex Problem Solving (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mihir Parmar, Xin Liu, Palash Goyal, Yanfei Chen, Long Le, Swaroop Mishra, Hossein Mobahi, Jindong Gu, Zifeng Wang, Hootan Nakhost, Chitta Baral, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister, Hamid Palangi
| Challenge: | Existing methods for natural planning lack constraint-guided iterative verification and adaptive selection . a recent study found that LLMs are not good at such planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic and easily scalable agent framework with three key components: constraint, verification, and selection agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference-time algorithms on NATURAL PLAN and OlympiadBench benchmarks. |
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. |
A Glitch in the Matrix? Locating and Detecting Language Model Grounding with Fakepedia (2024.acl-long)
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Giovanni Monea, Maxime Peyrard, Martin Josifoski, Vishrav Chaudhary, Jason Eisner, Emre Kiciman, Hamid Palangi, Barun Patra, Robert West
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have an impressive ability to draw on novel information supplied in their context, yet the mechanisms underlying contextual grounding remain unknown. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to study grounding abilities using a counterfactual dataset constructed to clash with a model's parametric knowledge using Fakepedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates grounding abilities when the internal parametric knowledge clashes with the contextual information. |
PLAN-TUNING: Post-Training Language Models to Learn Step-by-Step Planning for Complex Problem Solving (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mihir Parmar, Palash Goyal, Xin Liu, Yiwen Song, Mingyang Ling, Chitta Baral, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that decomposing complex problems into simple subtasks has significantly boosted the performance of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-training framework that distills synthetic task decompositions and fine-tunes smaller LLMs via supervised and reinforcement-learning objectives to improve complex reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on GSM8k and MATH benchmarks and shows that it can improve generalization capabilities on out-of-domain datasets. |
NaturalAdversaries: Can Naturalistic Adversaries Be as Effective as Artificial Adversaries? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work has explored adversarial example generation for natural language understanding tasks, but these examples are often unrealistic and diverge from the real-world data distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adversarial example generation that is effective at fooling a given classifier and a generative model based on the key tokens from the first stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes across domains and offers insights for future research on improving robustness of neural text classification models. |
Gender-tuning: Empowering Fine-tuning for Debiasing Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for debiasing are resource-intensive and costly. Existing solutions for debiansing require fine-tuning on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Masked Language Modeling (MLM) training objectives into fine-tuning’s training process to debiase the PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of gender bias scores while improving PLMs’ performance solely using the downstream tasks’ dataset. |
Enriching Transformers with Structured Tensor-Product Representations for Abstractive Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
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Yichen Jiang, Asli Celikyilmaz, Paul Smolensky, Paul Soulos, Sudha Rao, Hamid Palangi, Roland Fernandez, Caitlin Smith, Mohit Bansal, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization is the task of generating a concise summary of input documents . a middle-aged man and a young girl died after they were unable to avoid the plane . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that enriches the original Transformer with a Tensor Product Representation for abstractive summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the Transformer and the original TP-Transformer significantly on several datasets. |