Papers by Monica Sunkara
Masked Audio Text Encoders are Effective Multi-Modal Rescorers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Masked Language Models (MLMs) have proven to be effective for second-pass rescoring in Automatic Speech Recognition systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal masked language model rescorer which integrates acoustic representations into the input space of MLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces word error rate (WER) by 4%-16% on in-domain and 3%-7% on out-of-domain datasets over the text-only baseline. |
CONFETTI: Conversational Function-Calling Evaluation Through Turn-Level Interactions (2025.acl-long)
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Tamer Alkhouli, Katerina Margatina, James Gung, Raphael Shu, Claudia Zaghi, Monica Sunkara, Yi Zhang
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks lack comprehensive assessment of large language models in complex conversational scenarios. |
| Approach: | They introduce a conversational benchmark to evaluate function-calling capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the function-calling capabilities and response quality of large language models. |
Supplement Generation Training for Enhancing Agentic Task Performance (2026.findings-acl)
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Young Min Cho, Daniele Bonadiman, Divya Bhargavi, Tamer Alkhouli, Salvatore Romeo, Dongwei Jiang, Khushbu Pahwa, Yubin Ge, Etsuko Ishii, Monica Sunkara, Yi Zhang
| Challenge: | Training large foundation models for agentic tasks is impractical due to high computational costs, long iteration cycles, and rapid obsolescence as new models are released. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains a small LLM to generate supplemental text that helps the larger LLM solve the task more effectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach decouples task-specific optimization from large foundation models . it achieves consistent and significant performance gains across diverse tasks and models - all without gradient access to the actor model. |
CERET: Cost-Effective Extrinsic Refinement for Text Generation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) generate incomplete, biased or misleading outputs in their initial attempts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for refining text generation that takes into account semantic stability, entailment and inter-sample uncertainty measures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms self-consistency and self-rerank baselines under various task setups by 1.6% and 3.5% respectively. |
TReMu: Towards Neuro-Symbolic Temporal Reasoning for LLM-Agents with Memory in Multi-Session Dialogues (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Temporal reasoning in multi-session dialogues presents a significant challenge which has been under-studied in previous temporal reasoning benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment LoCoMo dialogues and create multi-choice QAs to construct a temporal reasoning evaluation task and a framework to enhance temporal thinking capabilities of LLM-agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves temporal reasoning performance compared to baseline methods, raising from 29.83 on GPT-4o via standard prompting to 77.67 via the proposed framework. |
MemInsight: Autonomous Memory Augmentation for LLM Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) agents have evolved to intelligently process information, make decisions, and interact with users or tools. |
| Approach: | They propose an autonomous memory augmentation approach to enhance semantic data representation and retrieval mechanisms by leveraging historical interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms a baseline RAG by 34% in recall for LoCoMo retrieval on three task scenarios and boosts persuasiveness of recommendations by 14%. |
MEAV: Model Editing with Alignment Vectors for inference time LLM alignment in single and multidomain preference spectrum (2026.findings-acl)
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Sadat Shahriar, Zheng Qi, Nikolaos Pappas, Srikanth Doss, Kishaloy Halder, Monica Sunkara, Manuel Mager, Yassine Benajiba
| Challenge: | Existing training-time alignment methods require full retraining when a change is needed. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time model-editing-based alignment method that learns encoded representations of preference dimensions and allows dynamic adjusting of the model behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to align large language models to human preferences . it reduces the cost of inference by half compared to the prompt engineering approach . |
Adaptation Approaches for Nearest Neighbor Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Semi-parametric Nearest Neighbor Language Models (kNN-LMs) have produced impressive gains over purely parametric LMs, however, there has been little investigation into adapting such models for new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt kNN-LMs to expand neighborhood retrieval over an additional adaptation datastore and adapt the weights of retrieved neighbors using a learned Rescorer module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms purely parametric adaptation and zero-shot models and achieves perplexity improvements of 17.1% and 16% across domains. |
Explicit Trait Inference for Multi-Agent Coordination (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) based multi-agent systems (MAS) show promise on complex tasks but remain prone to failures of coordination, such as goal drift, error cascades, and misaligned behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychologically grounded method for improving coordination using Explicit Trait Inference (ETI) ETI enables agents to infer and track partner characteristics along two established psychological dimensions—warmth (e.g., trust) and competence (eg. skill) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces payoff loss in controlled and realistic multi-agent settings by 45–77% and improves performance by 3–29% depending on scenario and model. |
SAMULE: Self-Learning Agents Enhanced by Multi-level Reflection (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern AI agents rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) as their reasoning engines, but they still face the challenge of generating meaningful reflections due to inadequate error analysis and a reliance on rare successful trajectories. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for self-learning agents powered by a retrospective language model that generates reflections during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms reflection-based baselines on three challenging benchmarks. |