Papers by Taylor Sorensen
Prompt Compression and Contrastive Conditioning for Controllability and Toxicity Reduction in Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | We explore the idea of compressing the prompts used to condition language models. |
| Approach: | They explore the idea of compressing the prompts used to condition language models . they show that compressed prompts can retain a substantive amount of information about the original prompt . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be extended to controllability and toxicity reduction. |
Impossible Distillation for Paraphrasing and Summarization: How to Make High-quality Lemonade out of Small, Low-quality Model (2024.naacl-long)
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Jaehun Jung, Peter West, Liwei Jiang, Faeze Brahman, Ximing Lu, Jillian Fisher, Taylor Sorensen, Yejin Choi
| Challenge: | Impossible Distillation is a framework for paraphrasing and sentence summarization that can be trained from a low-quality teacher model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that distills a high-quality dataset from a low-quality teacher . they hypothesize and verify the paraphrastic proximity intrinsic to pre-trained LMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on unconstrained paraphrase generation and sentence summarization benchmarks. |
NovaCOMET: Open Commonsense Foundation Models with Symbolic Knowledge Distillation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Peter West, Ronan Bras, Taylor Sorensen, Bill Lin, Liwei Jiang, Ximing Lu, Khyathi Chandu, Jack Hessel, Ashutosh Baheti, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi
| Challenge: | a new commonsense knowledge model, NovaCOMET, combines knowledge and general task models. |
| Approach: | They propose an open commonsense knowledge model that combines knowledge and general task models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or exceeds existing knowledge models on commonsense reasoning tasks. |
An Information-theoretic Approach to Prompt Engineering Without Ground Truth Labels (2022.acl-long)
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Taylor Sorensen, Joshua Robinson, Christopher Rytting, Alexander Shaw, Kyle Rogers, Alexia Delorey, Mahmoud Khalil, Nancy Fulda, David Wingate
| Challenge: | Existing prompt engineering methods require labeled data and access to model parameters . a new method for selecting prompt templates without labeles and without direct access to the model is needed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for selecting prompt templates without labeled examples and without direct access to the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs at almost oracle levels, without labels, on 7 datasets representing 7 different NLP tasks. |
Can Language Models Reason about Individualistic Human Values and Preferences? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and evaluation frameworks for achieving pluralistic alignment are limited by the diversity of people, which is pre-specified and coarsely categorized, papering over individuality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset transformed from the influential World Values Survey to study language models on the specific challenge of individualistic value reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict individualistic values with accuracies between 55% and 65%, while a precise description of individualistic value judgments cannot be approximated only via demographic information. |
Modular Pluralism: Pluralistic Alignment via Multi-LLM Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)
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Shangbin Feng, Taylor Sorensen, Yuhan Liu, Jillian Fisher, Chan Young Park, Yejin Choi, Yulia Tsvetkov
| Challenge: | Existing alignment paradigms for large language models learn an averaged human preference and struggle to model diverse preferences across cultures, demographics, and communities. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular framework that "plugs" into a base LLM a pool of smaller but specialized community LMs where models collaborate in distinct modes to support three modes of pluralism: Overton, steerable, and distributional. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework “plugs into” a base LLM a pool of smaller but specialized community LMs, where models collaborate in distinct modes to support three modes of pluralism: Overton, steerable, and distributional. |
Value Profiles for Encoding Human Variation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Taylor Sorensen, Pushkar Mishra, Roma Patel, Michael Henry Tessler, Michiel A. Bakker, Georgina Evans, Iason Gabriel, Noah Goodman, Verena Rieser
| Challenge: | Using value profiles and a steerable decoder model to estimate ratings is crucial for personalization, pluralistic model alignment, and computational social science. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent individuals using value profiles and a steerable decoder model to estimate ratings conditioned on a value profile or other rater information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model interpretably changes ratings according to semantic profile differences and is well-calibrated. |
Information-Guided Identification of Training Data Imprint in (Proprietary) Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Abhilasha Ravichander, Jillian Fisher, Taylor Sorensen, Ximing Lu, Maria Antoniak, Bill Yuchen Lin, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi
| Challenge: | Lack of transparency in training data is limiting external oversight and inspection of LLMs for issues such as copyright infringement and data contamination. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify training data known to proprietary LLMs without requiring access to model weights or token probabilities by using information-guided probes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can identify training data known to proprietary LLMs without access to model weights or token probabilities. |