Papers by Melanie Kambadur
Parallel-SFT: Improving Zero-Shot Cross-Programming-Language Transfer for Code RL (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhaofeng Wu, Shiqi Wang, Boya Peng, Anuj Kumar Goyal, Melanie Kambadur, Sebastian Ruder, Yoon Kim, Chloe Bi
| Challenge: | Modern language models demonstrate impressive coding capabilities in common programming languages (PLs) but their performance in lower-resource PLs is often limited by training data availability. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot cross-programming-language transfer task for code RL . they propose RL training in a source PL fails to improve performance on other target PLs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves transferability in Llama-3.1 code generation on parallel-stack model . it also improves performance on other target PLs, compared to single-PL SFT . |
“I’m sorry to hear that”: Finding New Biases in Language Models with a Holistic Descriptor Dataset (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Language models are increasingly important to measure all possible demographic markers of identity . many datasets for measuring bias are limited in their coverage of demographic axes . |
| Approach: | They propose a bias measurement dataset that includes nearly 600 descriptor terms across 13 demographic axes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset explores, detects, and reduces biases in language models. |
Self-Generated Critiques Boost Reward Modeling for Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Yue Yu, Zhengxing Chen, Aston Zhang, Liang Tan, Chenguang Zhu, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Yundi Qian, Xuewei Wang, Suchin Gururangan, Chao Zhang, Melanie Kambadur, Dhruv Mahajan, Rui Hou
| Challenge: | Existing reward models produce scalar scores and struggle to incorporate critiques in a natural language format. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that predicts critiques and rewards using self-generated critiques without extra supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reward modeling accuracy by 3.7%-7.3% compared to standard reward models and LLM judges. |
A Systematic Examination of Preference Learning through the Lens of Instruction-Following (2025.naacl-long)
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Joongwon Kim, Anirudh Goyal, Aston Zhang, Bo Xiong, Rui Hou, Melanie Kambadur, Dhruv Mahajan, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Liang Tan
| Challenge: | a recent study has found that preference learning is a key tool for enhancing LLM training and alignment. |
| Approach: | They use a synthetic data generation pipeline to generate 48,000 unique instruction-following prompts with 23 verifiable constraints to obtain preference pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates 48,000 unique instruction-following prompts with 23 verifiable constraints that enable fine-grained and automated quality assessments of model responses. |