Papers by Jeffrey Li
TVShowGuess: Character Comprehension in Stories as Speaker Guessing (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Our proposed task, TVShowGuess, builds on the scripts of TV series and takes the form of guessing the anonymous main characters based on the backgrounds of the scenes and the dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that takes the form of guessing the anonymous main characters based on the backgrounds of the scenes and the dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baselines, yet lag behind human performance. |
RAC: Efficient LLM Factuality Correction with Retrieval Augmentation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive results across a wide range of tasks, yet they can often produce factually incorrect outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-latency post-correction method that decomposes the LLM’s output into atomic facts and applies a fine-grained verification and correction process with retrieved content to verify and correct the Llm-generated output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has greatly reduced latency and token consumption up to 7x compared to previous state-of-the-art methods with similar or better performance. |
Efficient Large Scale Language Modeling with Mixtures of Experts (2022.emnlp-main)
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Mikel Artetxe, Shruti Bhosale, Naman Goyal, Todor Mihaylov, Myle Ott, Sam Shleifer, Xi Victoria Lin, Jingfei Du, Srinivasan Iyer, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Giridharan Anantharaman, Xian Li, Shuohui Chen, Halil Akin, Mandeep Baines, Louis Martin, Xing Zhou, Punit Singh Koura, Brian O’Horo, Jeffrey Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mona Diab, Zornitsa Kozareva, Veselin Stoyanov
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts layers (MoEs) enable efficient scaling of language models . large autoregressive language models such as GPT-3 can be adapted to a wide range of tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mixture of Experts layers to enable efficient scaling of language models . they find that MoEs are substantially more compute efficient than dense models compared to MoE models - but only when they are more modestly trained . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms dense models in a wide range of tasks and domains. |
TiC-LM: A Web-Scale Benchmark for Time-Continual LLM Pretraining (2025.acl-long)
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Jeffrey Li, Mohammadreza Armandpour, Seyed Iman Mirzadeh, Sachin Mehta, Vaishaal Shankar, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Samy Bengio, Oncel Tuzel, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Hadi Pouransari, Fartash Faghri
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) trained on historical web data inevitably become outdated. |
| Approach: | They propose a web-scale dataset for time-continual pretraining of LLMs derived from 114 dumps of Common Crawl (CC) they also design time-stratified evaluations to assess how well various continual learning methods adapt to new data while retaining past knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that autoregressive meta-schedules combined with a fixed-ratio replay of older data can achieve comparable held-out loss to re-training from scratch, while requiring significantly less computation (2.6x). |
Meaning Representations for Natural Languages: Design, Models and Applications (2022.emnlp-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial reviews the design of common meaning representations and SoTA models for predicting meaning representation models. |
| Approach: | This tutorial reviews the design of common meaning representations and SoTA models for predicting meaning representation models. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial reviews the design of common meaning representations and SoTA models for predicting meaning representation models . it also reviews the applications of meaning representation in downstream NLP tasks and real-world applications . |
Construction of Paired Knowledge Graph - Text Datasets Informed by Cyclic Evaluation (2024.lrec-main)
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Ali Mousavi, Xin Zhan, He Bai, Peng Shi, Theodoros Rekatsinas, Benjamin Han, Yunyao Li, Jeffrey Pound, Joshua M. Susskind, Natalie Schluter, Ihab F. Ilyas, Navdeep Jaitly
| Challenge: | Prior studies have shown that sequence-to-sequence models learn to hallucinate when the conditioning data has poor correlation with the sequence being produced. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that pairs Knowledge Graphs (KG) and text together and compare their results to a cyclic evaluation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on cyclic generation of KGs than on KG-T, but less well on synchronization of KTs. |
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 . |
Beyond a Single Extractor: Re-thinking HTML-to-Text Extraction for LLM Pre-training (2026.findings-eacl)
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Jeffrey Li, Joshua P Gardner, Doug Kang, Fangping Shi, Karanjeet Singh, Chun-Liang Li, Herumb Shandilya, David Leo Wright Hall, Oncel Tuzel, Percy Liang, Ludwig Schmidt, Hadi Pouransari, Fartash Faghri
| Challenge: | Existing open-source datasets predominantly apply a single fixed extractor to all webpages. |
| Approach: | They propose to take a Union over different extractors to improve model performance . they show that extractor choice can significantly impact downstream task performance based on content type . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can increase the token yield of DCLM-Baseline by 71% while maintaining benchmark performance. |
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. |
Meaning Representations for Natural Languages: Design, Models and Applications (2024.lrec-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | a tutorial reviews the design of common meaning representations and SoTA models for predicting meaning representation. |
| Approach: | This tutorial reviews the design of common meaning representations and SoTA models for predicting meaning representation. authors propose a cutting-edge, full-day tutorial for all stakeholders in the AI community. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial reviews the design of common meaning representations and SoTA models for predicting meaning representation models . it also reviews the applications of meaning representation in downstream NLP tasks and real-world applications . |
ConvKGYarn: Spinning Configurable and Scalable Conversational Knowledge Graph QA Datasets with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Ronak Pradeep, Daniel Lee, Ali Mousavi, Jeffrey Pound, Yisi Sang, Jimmy Lin, Ihab Ilyas, Saloni Potdar, Mostafa Arefiyan, Yunyao Li
| Challenge: | Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are a powerful tool for capturing structured representations of the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable method for generating up-to-date and configurable conversational KGQA datasets that adheres to human interaction configurations and operates at a significantly larger scale. |
| Outcome: | Qualitative psychometric analyses show that ConvKGYarn produces high-quality data comparable to popular conversational KGQA datasets across various metrics. |
MBTI Personality Prediction for Fictional Characters Using Movie Scripts (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing NLP models cannot predict character's personality types based on text classifications . character comprehension is the cornerstone of understanding stories in psychology and education. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to predict movie character's MBTI or Big 5 personality types based on the narratives of the character. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in the task and is more accurate than random guesses. |