Papers by Sullam Jeoung
StereoMap: Quantifying the Awareness of Human-like Stereotypes in Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been observed to encode harmful associations present in the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to map LLMs' perceptions of how demographic groups have been viewed by society using the dimensions of Warmth and Competence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maps LLMs’ perceptions of social groups using the dimensions of Warmth and Competence. |
PromptPrism: A Linguistically-Inspired Taxonomy for Prompts (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | PromptPrism is a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels: functional structure, semantic component, and syntactic pattern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy bridges traditional language understanding with modern LLM research . it improves prompt quality and improves model performance across tasks . |
Semantic Networks Extracted from Students’ Think-Aloud Data are Correlated with Students’ Learning Performance (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Largescale open online courses (MOOCs) are available to hundreds of millions of learners, but efficiently evaluating these students' performance remains a crucial task for educators. |
| Approach: | They propose to use textbook-based information as a semantic network to extract concepts and relations from students' verbal data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models extract concepts and relations from students’ verbal data and show that denser and more interconnected networks were associated with more elaborated knowledge acquisition. |
Tales of Morality: Comparing Human- and LLM-Generated Moral Stories from Visual Cues (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has found that stories are central to how humans communicate moral values . |
| Approach: | They compare human- and LLM-generated moral narratives based on images annotated by humans for moral content . authors propose a framework for evaluating moral storytelling in vision-language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model compared human- and LLM-generated narratives on images . human stories reflect a balanced distribution of moral foundations and coherent narrative arcs, but LLMs emphasize Care foundation and lack emotional resolution. |
A Systematic Survey of Automatic Prompt Optimization Techniques (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kiran Ramnath, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Xuan Qi, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Sangmin Woo, Sullam Jeoung, Yawei Wang, Haozhu Wang, Han Ding, Yuzhe Lu, Zhichao Xu, Yun Zhou, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Qiaojing Yan, Yueyan Chen, Haibo Ding, Panpan Xu, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompt engineering have created impediments for end users to adopt . however, prompt engineering remains an impedance due to rapid advances in models, tasks, and associated best practices. |
| Approach: | They propose to define APO as a 5-part unifying framework and categorize all relevant works based on their salient features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aims to improve the performance of large language models on various tasks. |
BoundRL: Efficient Token-level Structured Text Segmentation through Reinforced Boundary Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoyuan Li, Zhengyuan Shen, Sullam Jeoung, Yueyan Chen, Jiayu Li, Qi Zhu, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala
| Challenge: | Structured texts often contain elements beyond plain language, such as code snippets, which conventional sentence-level segmentation methods cannot handle effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level approach that performs efficient token-based text segmentation and label prediction for long structured texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models on short-shot prompts and SFT and standard RLVR models on complex LLM prompts. |
Unlearning Bias in Language Models by Partitioning Gradients (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has shown that large-scale pretrained language models exhibit issues relating to racism, sexism, religion bias, and toxicity in general. |
| Approach: | They propose a gray-box method for debiasing pretrained masked language models using partitioned contrastive gradient unlearning (PCGU) aims to optimize only the weights that contribute most to a specific domain of bias by computing a first-order approximation based on the gradients of contrastive sentence pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is low-cost and can pinpoint the sources of social bias in large pretrained language models. |
SQL-Trail: Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Interleaved Feedback for Text-to-SQL (2026.acl-long)
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Harper Hua, Zhen Han, Zhengyuan Shen, Meng-Chieh Lee, Sheng Guan, Qi Zhu, Sullam Jeoung, Yueyan Chen, Yunfei Bai, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved Text-to-SQL generation, but a gap remains between AI systems and human experts on challenging benchmarks such as BIRD-Sql. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn reinforcement learning agentic framework for Text-to-SQL that uses execution feedback to iteratively refine its predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms proprietary systems on 7B and 14B models by **5% on average, underscoring the effectiveness of interactive, agentic workflows for robust Text-to-SQL generation. |
Detection and Mitigation of the Negative Impact of Dataset Extractivity on Abstractive Summarization (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that extractivity can affect output extractivity and the amount of factual information (i.e. faithfulness) in abstractive summarization models. |
| Approach: | They propose to design copy labels to fix the model's copying behaviors and train the model with a copy mechanism to reduce the negative impact of high extractivity on model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several competitive baselines and shows that low extractivity can improve model performance, while higher extractivity leads to a tendency for the model to copy text continuously from the source document rather than identifying and summarizing important content. |