Papers by Sinead Williamson
Reasoning’s Razor: Reasoning Improves Accuracy but Hurts Recall at Critical Operating Points in Safety and Hallucination Detection (2026.eacl-long)
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Atoosa Chegini, Hamid Kazemi, Garrett Souza, Maria Safi, Yang Song, Samy Bengio, Sinead Williamson, Mehrdad Farajtabar
| Challenge: | a new study examines the suitability of reasoning for precision-sensitive classification tasks . false positives carry severe operational consequences, such as blocking legitimate queries . |
| Approach: | They propose to use reasoning for classification tasks under low false positive rate regimes . they find that Think On improves overall accuracy, but performs poorly at low FPRs a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning-augmented generation model outperforms self-verbalized confidence in precision-sensitive deployments. |
Steering into New Embedding Spaces: Analyzing Cross-Lingual Alignment Induced by Model Interventions in Multilingual Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Anirudh Sundar, Sinead Williamson, Katherine Metcalf, Barry-John Theobald, Skyler Seto, Masha Fedzechkina
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance on a variety of tasks from text summarization to zero-shot common-sense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to manipulate the embedding space of mLLMs by manipulating its activations to steer generation into the desired direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model interventions improves alignment of cross-lingual representations in multilingual large language models with up to 2x improvements in top-1 accuracy on cross-linguistic retrieval tasks. |
Revisiting Uncertainty Quantification Evaluation in Language Models: Spurious Interactions with Response Length Bias Results (2025.acl-short)
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Andrea Santilli, Adam Golinski, Michael Kirchhof, Federico Danieli, Arno Blaas, Miao Xiong, Luca Zappella, Sinead Williamson
| Challenge: | Language Models (LMs) produce factually incorrect outputs, or "hallucinations" Xiao and Wang et al., 2023) rely on AUROC to assess how well UQ methods distinguish correct from incorrect output. |
| Approach: | They propose to use length biases in correctness functions to skew UQ evaluations . they propose to employ LM-as-a-judge methods as the least length-biased . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is least length-biased, offering a promising path for a fairer evaluation. |