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Anil Ramakrishna

17 accepted papers

2025

Constrained Entropic Unlearning: A Primal-Dual Framework for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in real-world settings increasingly face the need to unlearn sensitive, outdated, or proprietary information. Existing unlearning methods typically formulate forgetting and retention as a regularized trade-off, combining both objectives into a single scalarized…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Do Not Design, Learn: A Trainable Scoring Function for Uncertainty Estimation in Generative LLMs

NAACL 2025findings

Uncertainty estimation (UE) of generative large language models (LLMs) is crucial for evaluating the reliability of generated sequences. A significant subset of UE methods utilize token probabilities to assess uncertainty, aggregating multiple token probabilities into a single UE score using a scori…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

LUME: LLM Unlearning with Multitask Evaluations

EMNLP 2025

Unlearning aims to remove copyrighted, sensitive, or private content from large language models (LLMs) without a full retraining. In this work, we develop a multi-task unlearning benchmark LUME that features three tasks: (1) unlearn synthetically generated creative short novels, (2) unlearn syntheti

2025

Not Every Token Needs Forgetting: Selective Unlearning Balancing Forgetting and Utility in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning has recently gained significant attention, driven by the need to remove unwanted information—such as private, sensitive, or copyrighted content—from trained models. However, conventional unlearning approaches indiscriminately update model parameters to forget al

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

On Localizing and Deleting Toxic Memories in Large Language Models

NAACL 2025findings

Warning: This paper contains offensive language.Ensuring that large language models (LLMs) do not generate harmful text is critical for their safe deployment. A common failure mode involves producing toxic responses to otherwise innocuous prompts. While various detoxification methods have been propo…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Towards LLM Unlearning Resilient to Relearning Attacks: A Sharpness-Aware Minimization Perspective and Beyond

ICML 2025poster

The LLM unlearning technique has recently been introduced to comply with data regulations and address the safety and ethical concerns of LLMs by removing the undesired data-model influence. However, state-of-the-art unlearning methods face a critical vulnerability: they are susceptible to ``relearn…

2025

Towards Safety Reasoning in LLMs: AI-agentic Deliberation for Policy-embedded CoT Data Creation

ACL 2025finding

Safety reasoning is a recent paradigm where LLMs reason over safety policies before generating responses, thereby mitigating limitations in existing safety measures such as over-refusal and jailbreak vulnerabilities. However, implementing this paradigm is challenging due to the resource-intensive pr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Unlearning as multi-task optimization: A normalized gradient difference approach with an adaptive learning rate

NAACL 2025long

Machine unlearning has been used to remove unwanted knowledge acquired by large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we examine machine unlearning from an optimization perspective, framing it as a regularized multi-task optimization problem, where one task optimizes a forgetting objective and anot…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Attribute Controlled Fine-tuning for Large Language Models: A Case Study on Detoxification

EMNLP 2024finding

We propose a constraint learning schema forfine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs)with attribute control. Given a training corpusand control criteria formulated as a sequence-level constraint on model outputs, our methodfine-tunes the LLM on the training corpus whileenhancing constraint satisfactio…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Explaining and Improving Contrastive Decoding by Extrapolating the Probabilities of a Huge and Hypothetical LM

EMNLP 2024main

Contrastive decoding (CD) (Li et al., 2022) improves the next-token distribution of a large expert language model (LM) using a small amateur LM. Although CD is applied to various LMs and domains to enhance open-ended text generation, it is still unclear why CD often works well, when it could fail, a…

2024

Tree-of-Traversals: A Zero-Shot Reasoning Algorithm for Augmenting Black-box Language Models with Knowledge Graphs

ACL 2024long

Knowledge graphs (KGs) complement Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing reliable, structured, domain-specific, and up-to-date external knowledge. However, KGs and LLMs are often developed separately and must be integrated after training. We introduce Tree-of-Traversals, a novel zero-shot reasoni…

2023

INVITE: a Testbed of Automatically Generated Invalid Questions to Evaluate Large Language Models for Hallucinations

EMNLP 2023short findings

Recent advancements in Large language models (LLMs) have enabled them to hold free form conversations over multiple turns, but they exhibit a tendency to make unfounded and incorrect statements, commonly known as hallucinations. In particular, LLMs hallucinate frequently when given invalid question…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Self-Healing Through Error Detection, Attribution, and Retraining

ICASSP 2023accepted

Negative feedback received from users of voice agents can provide valuable training signal to their underlying ML systems. However, such systems tend to have complex inference pipelines consisting of multiple model-based and deterministic components. Therefore, when negative feedback is received, it…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Federated Learning with Noisy User Feedback

NAACL 2022long

Machine Learning (ML) systems are getting increasingly popular, and drive more and more applications and services in our daily life. Thishas led to growing concerns over user privacy, since human interaction data typically needs to be transmitted to the cloud in order to trainand improve such system…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improving Large-Scale Conversational Assistants using Model Interpretation based Training Sample Selection

EMNLP 2022industry

This paper presents an approach to identify samples from live traffic where the customer implicitly communicated satisfaction with Alexa’s responses, by leveraging interpretations of model behavior. Such customer signals are noisy and adding a large number of samples from live traffic to training se…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2021

Towards Realistic Single-Task Continuous Learning Research for NER

EMNLP 2021finding

There is an increasing interest in continuous learning (CL), as data privacy is becoming a priority for real-world machine learning applications. Meanwhile, there is still a lack of academic NLP benchmarks that are applicable for realistic CL settings, which is a major challenge for the advancement…

2015

On quantifying facial expression-related atypicality of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

ICASSP 2015accepted

by adult observers. This paper focuses on data driven ways to analyze and quantify atypicality in facial expressions of children with ASD. Our objective is to uncover those characteristics of facial gestures that induce the sense of perceived atypicality in observers. Using a carefully collected mot…

Cited by 0SourceScholar