← Search

Ali Payani

34 accepted papers

2026

Benchmarking LLMs for Political Science: A United Nations Perspective

AAAI 2026technical

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making proc

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Command-V: Training-Free Representation Finetuning Transfer

ICLR 2026poster

Retrofitting large language models (LLMs) with new behaviors typically requires full finetuning or distillation—costly steps that must be repeated for every architecture. In this work, we introduce ⌘V (Command-V), a backpropagation-free behavior transfer method that copies an existing residual repre…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

GUI-Spotlight: Adaptive Iterative Focus Refinement for Enhanced GUI Visual Grounding

ICML 2026poster

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have markedly expanded the competence of graphical user-interface (GUI) systems, propelling them beyond controlled simulations into complex, real-world environments across diverse platforms. However, practical usefulness is still bounded by the reliability of…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LLMs as Rules Oracles: Exploring Real-World Multimodal Reasoning in Tabletop Strategy Game Environments

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce **LudoBench**, a multimodal reasoning benchmark that evaluates whether vision-enabled large language models (LMs) can acquire, integrate, and reason over heterogeneous game knowledge in mainstream analog tabletop games. Unlike prior works that emphasize deep strategic mastery, LudoBench…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Model Editing as a Double-Edged Sword: Steering Agent Behavior Toward Beneficence or Harm

AAAI 2026technical

Agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, deploying LLM-based agents in high-stakes domains comes with significant safety and ethical risks. Unethical behavior by these agents can directly result in serious real-world co

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

A Generic Framework for Conformal Fairness

ICLR 2025poster

Conformal Prediction (CP) is a popular method for uncertainty quantification with machine learning models. While conformal prediction provides probabilistic guarantees regarding the coverage of the true label, these guarantees are agnostic to the presence of sensitive attributes within the dataset.…

2025

AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists

EMNLP 2025

Despite long-standing efforts in accelerating scientific discovery with AI, building AI co-scientists remains challenging due to limited high-quality data for training and evaluation. To tackle this data scarcity issue, we present AutoSDT, an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding task

2025

Beyond Semantic Entropy: Boosting LLM Uncertainty Quantification with Pairwise Semantic Similarity

ACL 2025finding

Hallucination in large language models (LLMs) can be detected by assessing the uncertainty of model outputs, typically measured using entropy. Semantic entropy (SE) enhances traditional entropy estimation by quantifying uncertainty at the semantic cluster level. However, as modern LLMs generate long…

2025

Beyond Single Concept Vector: Modeling Concept Subspace in LLMs with Gaussian Distribution

ICLR 2025poster

Probing learned concepts in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for understanding how semantic knowledge is encoded internally. Training linear classifiers on probing tasks is a principle approach to denote the vector of a certain concept in the representation space. However, the single vector i…

2025

Can Knowledge Editing Really Correct Hallucinations?

ICLR 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations, referring to the non-factual information in generated content, despite their superior capacities across tasks. Meanwhile, knowledge editing has been developed as a new popular paradigm to correct erroneous factual knowledge encoded in LLMs wi…

2025

Deliberate Reasoning in Language Models as Structure-Aware Planning with an Accurate World Model

ACL 2025long

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models (LMs) remains a key challenge, especially for tasks that require complex, multi-step decision-making where existing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approaches struggle with consistency and verification. In this paper, we propose a novel reasoning framew…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Effective Training Data Synthesis for Improving MLLM Chart Understanding

ICCV 2025poster

Being able to effectively read scientific plots, or chart understanding, is a central part toward building effective agents for science. However, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially open-source ones, are still falling behind with a typical success rate of 30%-50% on challen…

2025

How Can Input Reformulation Improve Tool Usage Accuracy in a Complex Dynamic Environment? A Study on tau-bench

EMNLP 2025

Recent advances in reasoning and planning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have enabled their potential as autonomous agents capable of tool use in dynamic environments. However, in multi-turn conversational environments like 𝜏 ‐bench, these agents often struggle with consistent reasonin

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

InfantAgent-Next: A Multimodal Generalist Agent for Automated Computer Interaction

NeurIPS 2025poster

This paper introduces \textsc{InfantAgent-Next}, a generalist agent capable of interacting with computers in a multimodal manner, encompassing text, images, audio, and video. Unlike existing approaches that either build intricate workflows around a single large model or only provide workflow modular…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Investigating the Shortcomings of LLMs in Step-by-Step Legal Reasoning

NAACL 2025findings

Reasoning abilities of LLMs have been a key focus in recent years. One challenging reasoning domain with interesting nuances is legal reasoning, which requires careful application of rules, and precedents while balancing deductive and analogical reasoning, and conflicts between rules. Although there…

2025

Language Ranker: A Metric for Quantifying LLM Performance Across High and Low-Resource Languages

AAAI 2025technical

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies on extensive text corpora, which are often unevenly distributed across languages. This imbalance results in LLMs performing significantly better on high-resource languages like English, German, and French, while their capabilities in low-resourc…

2025

Large Vision-Language Model Alignment and Misalignment: A Survey Through the Lens of Explainability

EMNLP 2025

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing both visual and textual information. However, the critical challenge of alignment between visual and textual representations is not fully understood. This survey presents a comprehensive examination of align

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MDBench: A Synthetic Multi-Document Reasoning Benchmark Generated with Knowledge Guidance

ACL 2025finding

Natural language processing evaluation has made significant progress, largely driven by the proliferation of powerful large language mod-els (LLMs). New evaluation benchmarks are of increasing priority as the reasoning capabilities of LLMs are expanding at a rapid pace. In particular, while multi-do…

2025

SAE-SSV: Supervised Steering in Sparse Representation Spaces for Reliable Control of Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior reliably remains challenging, especially in open-ended generation settings. This paper introduces a novel supervised steering approach that operates

2024

A Federated Stochastic Multi-level Compositional Minimax Algorithm for Deep AUC Maximization

ICML 2024poster

AUC maximization is an effective approach to address the imbalanced data classification problem in federated learning. In the past few years, a couple of federated AUC maximization approaches have been developed based on the minimax optimization. However, directly solving a minimax optimization prob…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Can LLMs Reason in the Wild with Programs?

EMNLP 2024finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown superior capability to solve reasoning problems with programs. While being a promising direction, most of such frameworks are trained and evaluated in settings with a prior knowledge of task requirements. However, as LLMs become more capable, it is necessary t…

2024

Data-Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining: Prioritizing Data Quality over Quantity

AISTATS 2024poster

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) on large-scale image-caption datasets learns representations that can achieve remarkable zero-shot generalization. However, such models require a massive amount of pre-training data. Improving the quality of the pre-training data has been shown to be mu…

2024

Few-shot Adaptation to Distribution Shifts By Mixing Source and Target Embeddings

ICML 2024poster

Pretrained machine learning models need to be adapted to distribution shifts when deployed in new target environments. When obtaining labeled data from the target distribution is expensive, few-shot adaptation with only a few examples from the target distribution becomes essential. In this work, we…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Natural Language to First-Order Logic Translation

ACL 2024long

Advancements in logical reasoning, utilizing LLMs to convert natural language into logical symbolism, combined with the use of external theorem provers, have repositioned the symbolic approach as a central point of interest. The main challenge within this paradigm lies in the LLMs’ capability to acc…

2024

Large Language Models Can Learn Temporal Reasoning

ACL 2024long

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, they are not without their flaws and inaccuracies. Recent studies have introduced various methods to mitigate these limitations. Temporal reasoning (TR), in particular, presents a significant challenge for LLMs d…

2024

MACM: Utilizing a Multi-Agent System for Condition Mining in Solving Complex Mathematical Problems

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recent advancements in large language models, such as GPT-4, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing standard queries. Despite these advancements, their performance substantially declines in advanced mathematical problems requiring complex, multi-step logical reasoning. To enhance th…

2024

TEILP: Time Prediction over Knowledge Graphs via Logical Reasoning

AAAI 2024technical

Conventional embedding-based models approach event time prediction in temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) as a ranking problem. However, they often fall short in capturing essential temporal relationships such as order and distance. In this paper, we propose TEILP, a logical reasoning framework that na…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2024

Temporal Inductive Logic Reasoning over Hypergraphs

IJCAI 2024poster

Inductive logic reasoning is a fundamental task in graph analysis, which aims to generalize patterns from data. This task has been extensively studied for traditional graph representations, such as knowledge graphs (KGs), using techniques like inductive logic programming (ILP). Existing ILP methods…

2024

When is Tree Search Useful for LLM Planning? It Depends on the Discriminator

ACL 2024long

In this paper, we examine how large language models (LLMs) solve multi-step problems under a language agent framework with three components: a generator, a discriminator, and a planning method. We investigate the practical utility of two advanced planning methods, iterative correction and tree searc…

2023

LogicDP: Creating Labels for Graph Data via Inductive Logic Programming

ICLR 2023poster

Graph data, such as scene graphs and knowledge graphs, see wide use in AI systems. In real-world and large applications graph data are usually incomplete, motivating graph reasoning models for missing-fact or missing-relationship inference. While these models can achieve state-of-the-art performance…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Text-to-SQL Error Correction with Language Models of Code

ACL 2023short

Despite recent progress in text-to-SQL parsing, current semantic parsers are still not accurate enough for practical use. In this paper, we investigate how to build automatic text-to-SQL error correction models. Noticing that token-level edits are out of context and sometimes ambiguous, we propose b…