Papers by Michael Desmond
LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks (2025.acl-short)
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Anna Bavaresco, Raffaella Bernardi, Leonardo Bertolazzi, Desmond Elliott, Raquel Fernández, Albert Gatt, Esam Ghaleb, Mario Giulianelli, Michael Hanna, Alexander Koller, Andre Martins, Philipp Mondorf, Vera Neplenbroek, Sandro Pezzelle, Barbara Plank, David Schlangen, Alessandro Suglia, Aditya K Surikuchi, Ece Takmaz, Alberto Testoni
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of NLP models with LLMs are based on human judgments . however, there are concerns about their validity and reproducibility in proprietary models . |
| Approach: | They evaluate 11 current LLMs for their ability to replicate annotations. they show substantial variance across models and datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can replicate human annotations on 20 NLP datasets and show substantial variance across models and datasets. |
Label Noise in Context (2020.acl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Label noise—incorrectly or ambiguously labeled training examples—can negatively impact model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-detection method that uses an example's neighborhood within the training set to reduce false positives and provide an explanation as to why the ex ample was flagged as noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art on precision and F0.5-score on short-text classification datasets. |
Evaluating the Prompt Steerability of Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Erik Miehling, Michael Desmond, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Elizabeth M. Daly, Kush R. Varshney, Eitan Farchi, Pierre Dognin, Jesus Rios, Djallel Bouneffouf, Miao Liu, Prasanna Sattigeri
| Challenge: | a primary question underlying alignment research is: whose views are we aligning to? |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the steerability of model personas as a function of prompting by defining a benchmark and inspecting how these indices change as if steering effort is a factor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals that the steerability of many current models is limited due to skew in baseline behavior and an asymmetry in their steerability across many persona dimensions. |
Granite Guardian: Comprehensive LLM Safeguarding (2025.naacl-industry)
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Inkit Padhi, Manish Nagireddy, Giandomenico Cornacchia, Subhajit Chaudhury, Tejaswini Pedapati, Pierre Dognin, Keerthiram Murugesan, Erik Miehling, Martín Santillán Cooper, Kieran Fraser, Giulio Zizzo, Muhammad Zaid Hameed, Mark Purcell, Michael Desmond, Qian Pan, Inge Vejsbjerg, Elizabeth M. Daly, Michael Hind, Werner Geyer, Ambrish Rawat, Kush R. Varshney, Prasanna Sattigeri
| Challenge: | a suite of advanced models is designed to detect and mitigate risks associated with prompts and responses. |
| Approach: | a team of researchers develop a model family to detect and mitigate risks associated with prompts and responses. the model family is based on the Granite 3.0 language models. |
| Outcome: | a new model family is designed to detect and mitigate risks associated with prompts and responses. |
Synthetic Data for Evaluation: Supporting LLM-as-a-Judge Workflows with EvalAssist (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Martín Santillán Cooper, Zahra Ashktorab, Hyo Jin Do, Erik Miehling, Werner Geyer, Jasmina Gajcin, Elizabeth M. Daly, Qian Pan, Michael Desmond
| Challenge: | EvalAssist is a web-based application designed to assist human-centered evaluation of language model outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data generation tool integrated into EvalAssist to assist human-centered evaluation of language model outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool supports flexible prompting, RAG-based grounding, persona diversity, and iterative generation workflows. |