Papers by Negar Foroutan
Discovering Knowledge-Critical Subnetworks in Pretrained Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models encode implicit representations of knowledge in their parameters, but localizing these representations and disentangling them from each other remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a masking scheme that can be applied to weights and neurons to discover such subnetworks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can remove specific knowledge from models while minimizing adverse effects on the original model. |
How Do Multilingual Language Models Remember Facts? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on English monolingual models, but how these mechanisms generalize to non-English languages remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They analyze three multilingual LLMs to find out how they can generalize recall mechanisms . they find that subject enrichment is language-independent, object extraction is language dependent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in multilingual contexts than in English models . the model is more efficient in multi-lingual context, but it is more complex in multilinguistic models compared to English models. |
Parity-Aware Byte-Pair Encoding: Improving Cross-lingual Fairness in Tokenization (2026.acl-long)
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Negar Foroutan, Clara Meister, Debjit Paul, Joel Niklaus, Sina Ahmadi, Antoine Bosselut, Rico Sennrich
| Challenge: | Tokenization is the first step of most NLP pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a parity-aware byte pair encoder that maximizes the compression gain of the currently worst-compressed language for cross-lingual parity. |
| Outcome: | a new algorithm reduces tokenization inequality by 89% compared to classical BPE . the proposed algorithm is based on a fair-max rule that maximizes the compression gain of the currently worst-compressed language . |
ConLID: Supervised Contrastive Learning for Low-Resource Language Identification (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource languages and dialects remain difficult to identify and categorize accurately due to data in these languages and are limited to single-domain data. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised contrastive learning approach to learn domain-invariant representations for low-resource languages by 3.2 percentage points while maintaining its performance for the high-resourced languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves LID performance on out-of-domain data for low-resource languages by 3.2 percentage points while maintaining its performance for the high-resourced languages. |
Breaking the Language Barrier: Improving Cross-Lingual Reasoning with Structured Self-Attention (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that multilingual language models (MultiLMs) are capable of logically reasoning over natural language statements, reasoning with their implicit knowledge, and performing multi-step reasoning when the model size is large enough. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that encourages cross-lingual attention in code-switched sequences and improves reasoning performance by up to 14%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves reasoning performance by 14% and 4% on the RuleTaker and LeapOfThought datasets. |
Discovering Language-neutral Sub-networks in Multilingual Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that multilingual pre-trained language models transfer well on cross-lingual downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They conceptualize language neutrality as a function of overlap between language-encoding sub-networks of multilingual models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on cross-lingual tasks despite being pre-trained on multiple languages . |
Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs for Global Language Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Alejandro Hernández-Cano, Alexander Hägele, Allen Hao Huang, Angelika Romanou, Antoni-Joan Solergibert, Barna Pásztor, Bettina Messmer, Dhia Garbaya, Eduard Frank Ďurech, Ido Hakimi, Juan Garcia Giraldo, Mete Ismayilzada, Negar Foroutan, Skander Moalla, Tiancheng Chen, Vinko Sabolčec, Yixuan Xu, Michael Aerni, Badr AlKhamissi, Inés Altemir Marinas, Mohammad Hossein Amani, Matin Ansaripour, Ilia Badanin, Harold Benoit, Emanuela Boros, Nicholas John Browning, Fabian Bösch, Maximilian Böther, Niklas Canova, Camille Challier, Clément Charmillot, Jonathan Coles, Jan Milan Deriu, Arnout Devos, Lukas Drescher, Daniil Dzenhaliou, Maud Ehrmann, Dongyang Fan, Simin Fan, Silin Gao, Miguel Gila, María Grandury, Diba Hashemi, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Jiaming Jiang, Mark Klein, Andrei Kucharavy, Anastasiia Kucherenko, Frederike Lübeck, Roman Machacek, Theofilos Ioannis Manitaras, Andreas Marfurt, Kyle Matoba, Simon Matrenok, Henrique Mendonça, Fawzi Roberto Mohamed, Syrielle Montariol, Luca Mouchel, Sven Najem-Meyer, Jingwei Ni, Gennaro Oliva, Matteo Pagliardini, Elia Palme, Andrei Panferov, Léo Paoletti, Marco Passerini, Ivan Pavlov, Auguste Poiroux, Kaustubh Ponkshe, Nathan Ranchin, Javier Rando, Mathieu Sauser, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Mukhammadali Sayfiddinov, Marian Schneider, Stefano Schuppli, Marco Scialanga, Andrei Semenov, Kumar Shridhar, Raghav Singhal, Anna Sotnikova, Alexander Sternfeld, Ayush Kumar Tarun, Paul Teiletche, Jannis Vamvas, Xiaozhe Yao, Hao Zhao, Alexander Ilic, Ana Klimovic, Andreas Krause, Caglar Gulcehre, David Rosenthal, Elliott Ash, Florian Tramèr, Joost VandeVondele, Livio Veraldi, Martin Rajman, Thomas C. Schulthess, Torsten Hoefler, Antoine Bosselut, Martin Jaggi, Imanol Schlag
| Challenge: | Apertus is a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) designed to address responsibility shortcomings in today’s open model ecosystem, namely data responsibility and global representation. |
| Approach: | They propose to release a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) that address data responsibility and global representation shortcomings in today’s open model ecosystem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is pretrained on openly available data and suppresses verbatim recall of data while retaining task performance. |
WikiMixQA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Question Answering over Tables and Charts (2025.findings-acl)
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Negar Foroutan, Angelika Romanou, Matin Ansaripour, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Karl Aberer, Rémi Lebret
| Challenge: | Documents are fundamental to preserving and disseminating information, often incorporating complex layouts, tables, and charts that pose significant challenges for automatic document understanding (DU). |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating cross-modal reasoning over tables and charts extracted from 4,000 Wikipedia pages . they evaluate 12 vision-language models that achieve 70% accuracy when provided with direct context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates models with high accuracy over tables and charts extracted from 4,000 Wikipedia pages . proprietary models achieve 70% accuracy when provided with direct context, but open-source models perform worse when retrieval from long documents is required. |
BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data (2026.eacl-long)
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Jaap Jumelet, Abdellah Fourtassi, Akari Haga, Bastian Bunzeck, Bhargav Shandilya, Diana Galvan-Sosa, Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama, Francesca Padovani, Francois Meyer, Hai Hu, Julen Etxaniz, Laurent Prevot, Linyang He, María Grandury, Mila Marcheva, Negar Foroutan, Nikitas Theodoropoulos, Pouya Sadeghi, Siyuan Song, Suchir Salhan, Susana Zhou, Yurii Paniv, Ziyin Zhang, Arianna Bisazza, Alex Warstadt, Leshem Choshen
| Challenge: | prevailing trend in language modeling research is to prioritize scaling, authors say . from infancy to maturity, English learners acquire language through exposure to less than 100M words . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual collection of datasets modeling the language a person observes from birth until they acquire a native language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform models trained on a fixed, developmentally plausible English corpus on various benchmarks. |