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Allyson Ettinger

14 accepted papers

2025

AI as Humanity’s Salieri: Quantifying Linguistic Creativity of Language Models via Systematic Attribution of Machine Text against Web Text

ICLR 2025oral

Creativity has long been considered one of the most difficult aspect of human intelligence for AI to mimic. However, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, has raised questions about whether AI can match or even surpass human creativity. We present CREATIVITY INDEX as the first step…

2025

FlexOLMo: Open Language Models for Flexible Data Use

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

We introduce FlexOLMo, a new class of language models (LMs) that supports (1) distributed training without data sharing, where different model parameters are independently trained on private datasets, and (2) data-flexible inference, where these parameters along with their associated data can be eas…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

To Err Is AI: A Case Study Informing LLM Flaw Reporting Practices

AAAI 2025technical

In August of 2024, 495 hackers generated evaluations in an open-ended bug bounty targeting the Open Language Model (OLMo) from The Allen Institute for AI. A vendor panel staffed by representatives of OLMo's safety program adjudicated changes to OLMo's documentation and awarded cash bounties to parti…

2024

Experimental Contexts Can Facilitate Robust Semantic Property Inference in Language Models, but Inconsistently

EMNLP 2024main

Recent zero-shot evaluations have highlighted important limitations in the abilities of language models (LMs) to perform meaning extraction. However, it is now well known that LMs can demonstrate radical improvements in the presence of experimental contexts such as in-context examples and instructio…

2024

The Generative AI Paradox: “What It Can Create, It May Not Understand”

ICLR 2024poster

The recent wave of generative AI has sparked unprecedented global attention, with both excitement and concern over potentially superhuman levels of artificial intelligence: models now take only seconds to produce outputs that would challenge or exceed the capabilities even of expert humans. At the s…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2024

When Hindsight is Not 20/20: Testing Limits on Reflective Thinking in Large Language Models

NAACL 2024findings

Recent studies suggest that self-reflective prompting can significantly enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the use of external feedback as a stop criterion raises doubts about the true extent of LLMs’ ability to emulate human-like self-reflection. In this pa…

2024

WildGuard: Open One-stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMs

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce WildGuard---an open, light-weight moderation tool for LLM safety that achieves three goals: (1) identifying malicious intent in user prompts, (2) detecting safety risks of model responses, and (3) determining model refusal rate. Together, WildGuard serves the increasing needs for automa…

2024

WildTeaming at Scale: From In-the-Wild Jailbreaks to (Adversarially) Safer Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce WildTeaming, an automatic red-teaming framework that mines in-the-wild user-chatbot interactions to discover 5.7K unique clusters of novel jailbreak tactics, and then composes selections of multiple mined tactics for systematic exploration of novel and even more challenging jailbreaks.…

2023

"You Are An Expert Linguistic Annotator": Limits of LLMs as Analyzers of Abstract Meaning Representation

EMNLP 2023short findings

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate an amazing proficiency and fluency in the $\textit{use}$ of language. Does that mean that they have also acquired insightful linguistic knowledge $\textit{about}$ the language, to an extent that they can serve as an "expert linguistic annotator"? In this pape…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Counterfactual reasoning: Testing language models’ understanding of hypothetical scenarios

ACL 2023short

Current pre-trained language models have enabled remarkable improvements in downstream tasks, but it remains difficult to distinguish effects of statistical correlation from more systematic logical reasoning grounded on the understanding of real world. We tease these factors apart by leveraging coun…

2023

Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems. This begs the question: Are these errors incidental, or do they si…

2022

“No, They Did Not”: Dialogue Response Dynamics in Pre-trained Language Models

COLING 2022main

A critical component of competence in language is being able to identify relevant components of an utterance and reply appropriately. In this paper we examine the extent of such dialogue response sensitivity in pre-trained language models, conducting a series of experiments with a particular focus o…

2021

Sorting through the noise: Testing robustness of information processing in pre-trained language models

EMNLP 2021main

Pre-trained LMs have shown impressive performance on downstream NLP tasks, but we have yet to establish a clear understanding of their sophistication when it comes to processing, retaining, and applying information presented in their input. In this paper we tackle a component of this question by exa…

Cited by 36SourcePDFScholar