Papers by Jason Li
A Measure-Theoretic Characterization of Tight Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Language modeling is a core task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize leakage onto the set of infinite sequences by a measure-theoretic approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language model families are tight, meaning they will not leak . the proposed language models are based on the 'sequence leakage' hypothesis . |
Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Shehzaad Dhuliawala, Mojtaba Komeili, Jing Xu, Roberta Raileanu, Xian Li, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Weston
| Challenge: | Large language models can generate plausible but incorrect factual information, termed hallucinations, but they can still fail on lesser known facts. |
| Approach: | They develop a method that allows language models to deliberate on the responses they give in order to correct their errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method decreases hallucinations across a variety of tasks, including list-based questions, closed book MultiSpanQA and longform text generation. |
When is a Language Process a Language Model? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In some pathological situations, such a stochastic process may "leak" probability mass onto the set of infinite strings. |
| Approach: | They propose to view a language model as a discrete stochastic process X t : t = = t + . |
| Outcome: | The proposed conditions of tightness are generalized to language models and the literature. |
LLMs Know More About Numbers than They Can Say (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in mathematical, scientific, financial and engineering domains. |
| Approach: | They probe the hidden states of several smaller open-source LLMs to find out how big they are . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves verbalized accuracy by 3.22% over base models. |
How to Motivate Your Dragon: Teaching Goal-Driven Agents to Speak and Act in Fantasy Worlds (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent improvement in the quality of natural language processing and generation (NLG) is needed for goal-oriented ML driven agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning system that integrates large-scale language modeling and commonsense reasoning-based pre-training to imbue the agent with relevant priors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is able to act and talk naturally with respect to their motivations. |
Limitations of Autoregressive Models and Their Alternatives (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Standard autoregressive language models only perform polynomial-time computation to compute probability of next symbol. |
| Approach: | authors propose alternative to standard autoregressive language models that use polynomial-time computation to compute probability of next symbol. |
| Outcome: | a large model size can grow superpolynomially in length, allowing it to store precomputed results and verify solutions. |
Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization (2023.acl-long)
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Xiang Lisa Li, Ari Holtzman, Daniel Fried, Percy Liang, Jason Eisner, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mike Lewis
| Challenge: | Using a language model, maximum probability is a poor decoding objective because it produces short and repetitive text. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable decoding approach that optimizes a contrastive objective subject to a plausibility constraint. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms four strong decoding algorithms in automatic and human evaluations across wikipedia, news and story domains. |
Don’t Say That! Making Inconsistent Dialogue Unlikely with Unlikelihood Training (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Unlikelihood is a technique developed for removal of repetition in language model completions . it allows for a model to be generalized to solve a number of problems . |
| Approach: | They extend the unlikelihood objective to generate generations that contain repetitions . they show that such an objective can be used to improve logical consistency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be applied to a number of dialogue tasks. |
Automated Generation of Accurate & Fluent Medical X-ray Reports (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing medical report generation efforts focus on producing human-readable reports, yet the generated text may not be well aligned to the clinical facts. |
| Approach: | They propose to automate the generation of medical reports from chest X-ray image inputs . medical reports are the primary medium, which physicians communicate findings from scans - authors say . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves fluency and clinical accuracy on common metrics. |
CheckMIABench: Firm Foundations For Membership Inference Attacks on Language Models (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Membership inference attacks are a canonical way to assess a machine learning model’s privacy properties. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for principled evaluation of membership inference attacks against large language models by leveraging the insight that training data before and after a fixed point during training are drawn from the same distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to evaluate membership inference attacks against large language models. |
Koel-TTS: Enhancing LLM based Speech Generation with Preference Alignment and Classifier Free Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shehzeen Samarah Hussain, Paarth Neekhara, Xuesong Yang, Edresson Casanova, Subhankar Ghosh, Roy Fejgin, Mikyas T. Desta, Rafael Valle, Jason Li
| Challenge: | Autoregressive speech token generation models suffer from hallucinations and undesired vocalizations that do not conform to conditioning inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder transformer model that improves contextual adherence of speech token generation LLMs through preference alignment and classifier-free guidance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous LLM-based models on intelligibility, speaker similarity and naturalness. |
Specializing Word Embeddings (for Parsing) by Information Bottleneck (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained word embeddings contain rich syntactic and semantic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational information bottleneck method to nonlinearly compress word embeddings . they compress each word embedded to either a discrete tag or a continuous vector . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be extended to other syntactic or semantic tasks. |
How Much Do Large Language Models Know about Human Motion? A Case Study in 3D Avatar Control (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new study explores the human motion knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) using 3D avatar control. |
| Approach: | They use 20 representative motion instructions to interpolate LLMs into avatar animations . they find they are strong at interpreting high-level body movements but struggle with precise body part positioning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is strong at interpreting high-level body movements but struggles with precise body part positioning. |
LSSF: Safety Alignment for Large Language Models through Low-Rank Safety Subspace Fusion (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment methods rely on fine-tuning, which inadvertently leads to the increased complexity and computational resources required. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety re-alignment framework with Low-Rank Safety Subspace Fusison that exploits low-rank safety characteristics of LLMs by constructing a low-ranked projection matrix to extract the principal components of safety vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits low-rank safety subspace of the LLMs and is stable during fine-tuning process and is isolated from the model’s general capabilities. |
Branch-Solve-Merge Improves Large Language Model Evaluation and Generation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are often used for multi-faceted language generation and evaluation tasks that require complex user constraints or taking into account multiple aspects and criteria. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model program that consists of branch, solve, and merge modules that are parameterized with specific prompts to the base LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed program improves the evaluation correctness and consistency for each LLM by up to 26%, reducing length and pairwise position biases by up 50%, and allowing LLaMA-2-chat to match or outperform GPT-4 on most domains. |
Better Alignment with Instruction Back-and-Forth Translation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | et al., 2023) proposes a method to improve instruction-tuning data . e.g., we generate synthetic instructions using the backtranslation approach . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve instruction-tuning data using web-based inputs . they generate synthetic instructions using the backtranslation approach and filter the generated data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the quality of instruction-tuning data based on preprocessed texts . it yields better AlpacaEval win rates than direct distillation . |
Toward Interactive Dictation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that allow both dictation and editing-by-voice restrict their command language to flat templates invoked by trigger words. |
| Approach: | They propose to allow users to interrupt dictation with spoken editing commands in open-ended natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can predict edited text with large pre-trained models and predict small programs. |
Bot-Adversarial Dialogue for Safe Conversational Agents (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new method for evaluating chatbot safety is proposed to mimic human-generated data . a bot-adversarial dialogue model learns undesirable features from this data, a study finds . |
| Approach: | They propose a human-and-model-in-the-loop framework for evaluating toxicity of chatbots . they propose two methods for safe conversational agents by either training on data or ”baking-in” safety to the generative model itself. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are safer than existing models while maintaining usability metrics, the authors say . they show that the proposed methods can be used to make safer models with human-model interactions . |
MoPe: Model Perturbation based Privacy Attacks on Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that Large Language Models can unintentionally leak sensitive information . a new method to identify with high confidence if a given text is in training data is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect if a given text is in a pre-trained language model . they show that MoPe is more effective than existing loss-based attacks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more effective than loss-based attacks and perturbation-based methods. |
Zero-Shot End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding via Cross-Modal Selective Self-Training (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end (E2E) spoken language understanding models are constrained by the cost of collecting speech-semantics pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that learns E2E SLU without speech-semantics pairs . they propose cross-modal selective self-training (CMSST) to address imbalance and noise issues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns E2E SLU without speech-semantics pairs . the proposed model requires the domains of speech-text and text-sensitization to match . |
A Critical Analysis of Document Out-of-Distribution Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiuxiang Gu, Yifei Ming, Yi Zhou, Jason Kuen, Vlad Morariu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Nikolaos Barmpalios, Anqi Liu, Yixuan Li, Tong Sun, Ani Nenkova
| Challenge: | Existing document understanding models focus on single-modal inputs such as images or texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a spatial-aware adapter to adapt transformer-based language models to document domain to exploit multi-modal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the OOD detection performance compared to using a standard language model and to competitive baselines. |
Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new problem of grounding natural language instructions to mobile UI actions is emerging . we use a Transformer to extract action phrase tuples from long-range natural language instruction . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that pairs English instructions with actions performed by people on a mobile UI emulator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 70.59% accuracy on predicting complete ground-truth action sequences in PixelHelp. |
Small and Practical BERT Models for Sequence Labeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for morphosyntactic tagging have focused on building separate models for each language or for a small group of related languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a scheme to train a single multilingual sequence labeling model that is small and fast enough to run on a CPU. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on low-resource languages and low-level models on codemixed inputs. |