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Alexander M Rush

27 accepted papers

2025

Commit0: Library Generation from Scratch

ICLR 2025poster

With the goal of benchmarking generative systems beyond expert software development ability, we introduce Commit0, a benchmark that challenges AI agents to write libraries from scratch. Agents are provided with a specification document outlining the library’s API as well as a suite of interactive un…

2025

Multi-Turn Code Generation Through Single-Step Rewards

ICML 2025spotlight

We address the problem of code generation from multi-turn execution feedback. Existing methods either generate code without feedback or use complex, hierarchical reinforcement learning to optimize multi-turn rewards. We propose a simple yet scalable approach, $\mu$CODE, that solves multi-turn code…

2025

Simple Guidance Mechanisms for Discrete Diffusion Models

ICLR 2025poster

Diffusion models for continuous data gained widespread adoption owing to their high quality generation and control mechanisms. However, controllable diffusion on discrete data faces challenges given that continuous guidance methods do not directly apply to discrete diffusion. Here, we provide a stra…

2024

Guess & Sketch: Language Model Guided Transpilation

ICLR 2024poster

Maintaining legacy software requires many software and systems engineering hours. Assembly code programs, which demand low-level control over the computer machine state and have no variable names, are particularly difficult for humans to analyze. Existing conventional program translators guarantee c…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

I Could’ve Asked That: Reformulating Unanswerable Questions

EMNLP 2024main

When seeking information from unfamiliar documents, users frequently pose questions that cannot be answered by the documents. While existing large language models (LLMs) identify these unanswerable questions, they do not assist users in reformulating their questions, thereby reducing their overall u…

2024

Language Model Inversion

ICLR 2024poster

Given a prompt, language models produce a distribution over all possible next tokens; when the prompt is unknown, can we use this distributional information to recover the prompt? We consider the problem of anguage model inversion and show that next-token probabilities contain a surprising amount of…

2024

ShadowLLM: Predictor-based Contextual Sparsity for Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

The high power consumption and latency-sensitive deployments of large language models (LLMs) have motivated efficiency techniques like quantization and sparsity. Contextual sparsity, where the sparsity pattern is input-dependent, is crucial in LLMs because the permanent removal of attention heads or…

2024

Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images, prior work reports a significant performance gap between diffusion and autoregressive (AR) methods in language modeling. In this work, we show that simple masked discrete diffusion is more performant than previously thought. We apply an…

2024

The Mamba in the Llama: Distilling and Accelerating Hybrid Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Linear RNN architectures, like Mamba, can be competitive with Transformer models in language modeling while having advantageous deployment characteristics. Given the focus on training large-scale Transformer models, we consider the challenge of converting these pretrained models for deployment. We…

2023

OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents

NeurIPS 2023poster

Large multimodal models trained on natural documents, which interleave images and text, outperform models trained on image-text pairs on various multimodal benchmarks. However, the datasets used to train these models have not been released, and the collection process has not been fully specified. W…

2023

Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models

NeurIPS 2023oral

The current trend of scaling language models involves increasing both parameter count and training dataset size. Extrapolating this trend suggests that training dataset size may soon be limited by the amount of text data available on the internet. Motivated by this limit, we investigate scaling lang…

2023

Symbolic Planning and Code Generation for Grounded Dialogue

EMNLP 2023long main

Large language models (LLMs) excel at processing and generating text and code. However, LLMs have had limited applicability in grounded task-oriented dialogue as they are difficult to steer toward task objectives and fail to handle novel grounding. We present a modular and interpretable grounded dia…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Text Embeddings Reveal (Almost) As Much As Text

EMNLP 2023long main

How much private information do text embeddings reveal about the original text? We investigate the problem of embedding \textit{inversion}, reconstructing the full text represented in dense text embeddings. We frame the problem as controlled generation: generating text that, when reembedded, is clos…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Tree Prompting: Efficient Task Adaptation without Fine-Tuning

EMNLP 2023long main

Prompting language models (LMs) is the main interface for applying them to new tasks. However, for smaller LMs, prompting provides low accuracy compared to gradient-based fine-tuning. Tree Prompting is an approach to prompting which builds a decision tree of prompts, linking multiple prompt-LM calls…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization

ICLR 2022spotlight

Large language models have recently been shown to attain reasonable zero-shot generalization on a diverse set of tasks (Brown et al., 2020). It has been hypothesized that this is a consequence of implicit multitask learning in language models’ pretraining (Radford et al., 2019). Can zero-shot genera…

2021

Learning from others' mistakes: Avoiding dataset biases without modeling them

ICLR 2021poster

State-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models often learn to model dataset biases and surface form correlations instead of features that target the intended underlying task. Previous work has demonstrated effective methods to circumvent these issues when knowledge of the bias is availabl…

Cited by 118SourcePDFScholar
2021

Low-Rank Constraints for Fast Inference in Structured Models

NeurIPS 2021poster

Structured distributions, i.e. distributions over combinatorial spaces, are commonly used to learn latent probabilistic representations from observed data. However, scaling these models is bottlenecked by the high computational and memory complexity with respect to the size of the latent representat…

2019

Avoiding Latent Variable Collapse with Generative Skip Models

AISTATS 2019poster

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) learn distributions of high-dimensional data. They model data with a deep latent-variable model and then fit the model by maximizing a lower bound of the log marginal likelihood. VAEs can capture complex distributions, but they can also suffer from an issue known as "…

Cited by 229SourcePDFScholar
2017

Image-to-Markup Generation with Coarse-to-Fine Attention

ICML 2017poster

We present a neural encoder-decoder model to convert images into presentational markup based on a scalable coarse-to-fine attention mechanism. Our method is evaluated in the context of image-to-LaTeX generation, and we introduce a new dataset of real-world rendered mathematical expressions paired wi…