Papers by Tianlu Wang
Understanding In-Context Learning via Supportive Pretraining Data (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a form of learning that provides a handful of examples at inference time, but it is not well understood why it emerges as the model has never been specifically trained on such demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They adapt an iterative, gradient-based approach to find a small subset of pretraining data that supports ICL and compare it with random subsets of pretrain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model's ICL ability by 18% if it is continued on a small subset of pretraining data. |
Efficient Tool Use with Chain-of-Abstraction Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
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Silin Gao, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Ping Yu, Xiaoqing Ellen Tan, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Olga Golovneva, Koustuv Sinha, Asli Celikyilmaz, Antoine Bosselut, Tianlu Wang
| Challenge: | Recent large language models have made progress at interpreting and executing instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to decouple general reasoning from specialized knowledge . they propose to use abstract reasoning chains and domain tools to reify each chain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on QA and mathematical reasoning domains. |
Gender Biases in Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Image Captioning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained evaluation metrics can perpetuate and amplify biases, causing inability to differentiate between biased and unbiased generations. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic study of gender biases in image captioning tasks . they show that pretrained models perpetuate and amplify biase . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-based evaluation metrics have shown good correlations with human judgments in language generation tasks. |
Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that training word embeddings in large corpora could lead to encoding societal biases present in these human-produced data. |
| Approach: | They conduct several intrinsic analyses to quantify, analyze and mitigate gender bias exhibited in ELMo’s contextualized word vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates gender bias on WinoBias probing corpus and demonstrates that it can be implemented in other systems. |
Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Generative Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xi Victoria Lin, Todor Mihaylov, Mikel Artetxe, Tianlu Wang, Shuohui Chen, Daniel Simig, Myle Ott, Naman Goyal, Shruti Bhosale, Jingfei Du, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Sam Shleifer, Punit Singh Koura, Vishrav Chaudhary, Brian O’Horo, Jeff Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Zornitsa Kozareva, Mona Diab, Veselin Stoyanov, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Large-scale generative language models such as GPT-3 are competitive few-shot learners. |
| Approach: | They train multilingual generative language models on a corpus covering a diverse set of languages and study their few- and zero-shot learning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-3 on 171 out of 182 directions with 32 training examples and surpasses the official supervised baseline in 45 directions. |
The ART of LLM Refinement: Ask, Refine, and Trust (2024.naacl-long)
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Kumar Shridhar, Koustuv Sinha, Andrew Cohen, Tianlu Wang, Ping Yu, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Mrinmaya Sachan, Jason Weston, Asli Celikyilmaz
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generative abilities, but can they judge the quality of their own generations and self-improve? |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning with a refinement strategy called *ART: Ask, Refine, and Trust* that asks necessary questions to decide when an LLM should refine its output and uses it to affirm or deny trust. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning with a refinement strategy achieves a performance gain of +5 points over baselines on two multistep reasoning tasks. |
ALERT: Adapt Language Models to Reasoning Tasks (2023.acl-long)
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Ping Yu, Tianlu Wang, Olga Golovneva, Badr AlKhamissi, Siddharth Verma, Zhijing Jin, Gargi Ghosh, Mona Diab, Asli Celikyilmaz
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown increasing in-context learning capabilities with scaling up the model and data sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and suite of analyses to evaluate reasoning skills of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model compares pre-trained and fine-tuned models on tasks that require reasoning skills to solve. |
CAT-Gen: Improving Robustness in NLP Models via Controlled Adversarial Text Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial text generation approaches can lead to generation lacking diversity or fluency, whereas perturbing in the intermediate representation space can lead a model to generate generations that are not related to the input. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate adversarial texts through controllable attributes that are known to be invariant to task labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more diverse and fluent adversarial examples, compared to existing approaches, and is more robust against model re-training and different model architectures. |
Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for co-reference resolution focus on gender bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark for co-reference resolution focused on gender bias, WinoBias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system removes the bias without significantly affecting performance on existing datasets. |
Visual News: Benchmark and Challenges in News Image Captioning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Visual News Captioner is an entity-aware model for news image captioning . Unlike standard image captions, news images depict situations where people, locations, and events are of paramount importance. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual news captioner model that integrates visual and textual features to generate captions with richer information such as events and entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate captions with richer information such as events and entities. |
Identifying and Mitigating Spurious Correlations for Improving Robustness in NLP Models (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work identifies task-specific shortcuts via human priors or error analyses, which requires extensive expertise and efforts. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically identify spurious correlations in NLP models at scale by using existing interpretability methods to extract tokens that significantly affect model’s decision process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can identify spurious correlations in NLP models at scale and mitigate these leads to more robust models in multiple applications. |
Double-Hard Debias: Tailoring Word Embeddings for Gender Bias Mitigation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to debias word embeddings from human-generated corpora inherit strong gender bias . prior work has suggested removing gender component from pre-trained word embeds or compressing gender information into a few dimensions of the embeddable space . |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that purifies word embeddings against inferred gender subspaces . they propose to preserve distributional semantics of pre-trained word embeds while reducing gender bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique preserves distributional semantics of pre-trained word embeddings while reducing gender bias to a larger degree than prior approaches. |
Text Characterization Toolkit (TCT) (2022.aacl-demo)
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Daniel Simig, Tianlu Wang, Verna Dankers, Peter Henderson, Khuyagbaatar Batsuren, Dieuwke Hupkes, Mona Diab
| Challenge: | Text Characterization Toolkit (TCT) is a tool that researchers can use to study characteristics of large datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a text characterization toolkit that researchers can use to study characteristics of large datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool can be used to study characteristics of large datasets and to understand the influence of attributes on models’ behaviour. |