Papers by Kevin Gao
The Benefits of Label-Description Training for Zero-Shot Text Classification (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have improved zero-shot text classification by allowing the transfer of semantic knowledge from the training data to classify among specific label sets in downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a small finetuning dataset to describe the labels for a task and to use it to further improve zero-shot accuracies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more accurate than zero-shot by 17-19% absolute across topic and sentiment datasets and more robust to choices required for zero- shot classification. |
Stochastic Answer Networks for Machine Reading Comprehension (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Several recent MRC models employ multi-step reasoning . we show that the use of a stochastic prediction dropout improves robustness . |
| Approach: | They propose a stochastic answer network that simulates multi-step reasoning in machine reading comprehension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves robustness and results competitive with state-of-the-art models on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset and Microsoft MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset. |
Toward Safe and Human-Aligned Game Conversational Recommendation via Multi-Agent Decomposition (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for conversational recommender systems (CRS) have strong results in movies, but games present distinct challenges . MATCHA framework provides specialized agents for intent parsing, tool-augmented retrieval, multi-LLM ranking, and stronger safety. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for conversational recommender systems that assigns specialized agents for intent parsing, tool-augmented retrieval, multi-LLM ranking and risk control. |
| Outcome: | MATCHA outperforms baselines on real user request dataset, improves Hit@5 by 20%, reduces popularity bias by 24%, and achieves 97.9% adversarial defense. |
GPT-Fathom: Benchmarking Large Language Models to Decipher the Evolutionary Path towards GPT-4 and Beyond (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM leaderboards often reference scores reported in other papers without consistent settings and prompts, which may encourage cherry-picking favored settings and for better results. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source and reproducible LLM evaluation suite built on top of OpenAI Evals that systematically evaluates 10+ leading LLMs and OpenAI’s legacy models on 20+ curated benchmarks across 7 capability categories. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation suite is built on top of OpenAI Evals and evaluates 10+ leading LLMs and OpenAI’s legacy models on 20+ curated benchmarks across 7 capability categories. |
“What makes a question inquisitive?” A Study on Type-Controlled Inquisitive Question Generation (2022.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results demonstrate that we can generate a variety of questions that adhere to specific types while drawing from the source texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a type-controlled framework for inquisitive question generation . they annotate an inquisite question dataset and train question type classifiers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates questions that adhere to specific types while drawing from the source texts. |
Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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Qiyue Gao, Xinyu Pi, Kevin Liu, Junrong Chen, Ruolan Yang, Xinqi Huang, Xinyu Fang, Lu Sun, Gautham Kishore, Bo Ai, Stone Tao, Mengyang Liu, Jiaxi Yang, Chao-Jung Lai, Chuanyang Jin, Jiannan Xiang, Benhao Huang, Zeming Chen, David Danks, Hao Su, Tianmin Shu, Ziqiao Ma, Lianhui Qin, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Recent studies have evaluated and shown limitations in specific capabilities such as visual understanding, but a systematic evaluation of VLMs’ fundamental WM abilities remains absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that assesses perception and prediction to provide an atomic evaluation of VLMs as WMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses perception and prediction abilities on 15 latest VLMs and compares them to human-level models. |
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Human-Centered Machine Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Marine Carpuat, Omri Asscher, Kalika Bali, Luisa Bentivogli, Fred Blain, Lynne Bowker, Monojit Choudhury, Hal Daumé Iii, Kevin Duh, Ge Gao, Alvin C Grissom II, Marzena Karpinska, Elaine C Khoong, William D. Lewis, Andre Martins, Mary Nurminen, Douglas W. Oard, Maja Popovic, Michel Simard, François Yvon
| Challenge: | Despite progress in MT, a gap persists between how the technology is developed and how it is used in real-world contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-centered approach to machine translation (MT) they argue that MT should be evaluated with diverse goals and contexts of use . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach emphasizes alignment of evaluation and design with diverse communicative goals and contexts of use. |