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Chitta Baral

64 accepted papers

2026

GuidedSampling: Steering LLMs Towards Diverse Candidate Solutions at Inference-Time

ICLR 2026poster

Repeated Sampling (RS) is a simple inference-time algorithm that has been shown to improve model performance on complex tasks. Although it is an effective way of scaling inference time, it often struggles to generate diverse solution candidates, frequently relying on the same underlying approach to…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AcT2I: Evaluating and Improving Action Depiction in Text-to-Image Models

EMNLP 2025

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have recently achieved remarkable success in generating images from textual descriptions. However, challenges still persist in accurately rendering complex scenes where actions and interactions form the primary semantic focus. Our key observation in this work is that T2I m

2025

ActionReasoningBench: Reasoning about Actions with and without Ramification Constraints

ICLR 2025poster

Reasoning about Actions and Change (RAC) has historically played a pivotal role in solving foundational AI problems, such as the frame problem. It has driven advancements in AI fields, such as non-monotonic and commonsense reasoning. RAC remains crucial for AI systems that operate in dynamic environ…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

EraseFlow: Learning Concept Erasure Policies via GFlowNet-Driven Alignment

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Erasing harmful or proprietary concepts from powerful text‑to‑image generators is an emerging safety requirement, yet current ``concept erasure'' techniques either collapse image quality, rely on brittle adversarial losses, or demand prohibitive retraining cycles. We trace these limitations to a myo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

GETReason: Enhancing Image Context Extraction through Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reasoning

ACL 2025long

Publicly significant images from events carry valuable contextual information with applications in domains such as journalism and education. However, existing methodologies often struggle to accurately extract this contextual relevance from images. To address this challenge, we introduce GETREASON (…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
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

Hypothesis Generation for Materials Discovery and Design Using Goal-Driven and Constraint-Guided LLM Agents

NAACL 2025findings

Materials discovery and design are essential for advancing technology across various industries by enabling the development of application-specific materials. Recent research has leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to accelerate this process. We explore the potential of LLMs to generate viable hy…

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

PLAN-TUNING: Post-Training Language Models to Learn Step-by-Step Planning for Complex Problem Solving

EMNLP 2025

Recently, decomposing complex problems into simple subtasks–a crucial part of human-like natural planning–to solve the given problem has significantly boosted the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, leveraging such planning structures during post-training to boost the performance o

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

PlanGEN: A Multi-Agent Framework for Generating Planning and Reasoning Trajectories for Complex Problem Solving

EMNLP 2025

Recent agent frameworks and inference-time algorithms often struggle with natural planning problems due to limitations in verifying generated plans or reasoning and varying complexity of instances within a single task. Many existing methods for these tasks either perform task-level verification with

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA

EMNLP 2025

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with principles like helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness typically relies on scalar rewards that obscure which objectives drive the training signal. We introduce QA-LIGN, which decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluation

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

RefEdit: A Benchmark and Method for Improving Instruction-based Image Editing Model on Referring Expressions

ICCV 2025poster

Despite recent advances in inversion and instruction-based image editing, existing approaches primarily excel at editing single, prominent objects but significantly struggle when applied to complex scenes containing multiple entities. To quantify this gap, we first introduce **`RefEdit-Bench`**, a r…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Stable Cinemetrics : Structured Taxonomy and Evaluation for Professional Video Generation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in video generation have enabled high-fidelity video synthesis from user provided prompts. However, existing models and benchmarks fail to capture the complexity and requirements of professional video generation. Towards that goal, we introduce Stable Cinemetrics, a structured evalua…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ThinkTuning: Instilling Cognitive Reflections without Distillation

EMNLP 2025

Recent advances in test-time scaling have led to the emergence of thinking LLMs that exhibit self-reflective behaviors and multi-step reasoning. While RL drives this self-improvement paradigm, recent studies show that solely RL does not truly instill these new reasoning abilities - it merely draws o

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ToW: Thoughts of Words Improve Reasoning in Large Language Models

NAACL 2025long

We introduce thoughts of words (ToW), a novel training-time data-augmentation method for next-word prediction. ToW views next-word prediction as a core reasoning task and injects fine-grained thoughts explaining what the next word should be and how it is related to the previous contexts in pre-train…

2025

UnSeenTimeQA: Time-Sensitive Question-Answering Beyond LLMs’ Memorization

ACL 2025long

This paper introduces UnSeenTimeQA, a novel data contamination-free time-sensitive question-answering (TSQA) benchmark. It differs from existing TSQA benchmarks by avoiding web-searchable queries grounded in the real world. We present a series of time-sensitive event scenarios based on synthetically…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

VOILA: Evaluation of MLLMs For Perceptual Understanding and Analogical Reasoning

ICLR 2025poster

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have become a powerful tool for integrating visual and textual information. Despite their exceptional performance on visual understanding benchmarks, measuring their ability to reason abstractly across multiple images remains a significant challenge. To addre…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Chaos with Keywords: Exposing Large Language Models Sycophancy to Misleading Keywords and Evaluating Defense Strategies

ACL 2024findings

This study explores the sycophantic tendencies of Large Language Models (LLMs), where these models tend to provide answers that match what users want to hear, even if they are not entirely correct. The motivation behind this exploration stems from the common behavior observed in individuals searchin…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

ConceptBed: Evaluating Concept Learning Abilities of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

AAAI 2024technical

The ability to understand visual concepts and replicate and compose these concepts from images is a central goal for computer vision. Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have lead to high definition and realistic image quality generation by learning from large databases of images and their…

2024

ECLIPSE: A Resource-Efficient Text-to-Image Prior for Image Generations

CVPR 2024poster

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models notably the unCLIP models (e.g. DALL-E-2) achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on various compositional T2I benchmarks at the cost of significant computational resources. The unCLIP stack comprises T2I prior and diffusion image decoder. The T2I prior model…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2024

InstructABSA: Instruction Learning for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis

NAACL 2024short

We introduce InstructABSA, an instruction learning paradigm for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) subtasks.Our method introduces positive, negative, and neutral examples to each training sample, and instruction tune the model (Tk-Instruct) for ABSA subtasks, yielding significant performance imp…

2024

Investigating Acceleration of LLaMA Inference by Enabling Intermediate Layer Decoding via Instruction Tuning with ‘LITE’

NAACL 2024findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide variety of tasks; however, their large size makes their inference slow and computationally expensive. Focusing on this problem, we study instruction tuning LLMs with additional explicit Losses from the Intermediate layer…

2024

Learning Temporally Composable Task Segmentations with Language

IROS 2024poster

In this work, we present an approach to identify sub-tasks within a demonstrated robot trajectory with the supervision provided by language instructions. Learning longer horizon tasks is challenging with techniques such as reinforcement learning and behavior cloning. Previous approaches have split t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

LogicBench: Towards Systematic Evaluation of Logical Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

Recently developed large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform remarkably well on a wide range of language understanding tasks. But, can they really “reason” over the natural language? This question has been receiving significant research attention and many reasoning skills such as commo…

2024

Lost in Translation? Translation Errors and Challenges for Fair Assessment of Text-to-Image Models on Multilingual Concepts

NAACL 2024short

Benchmarks of the multilingual capabilities of text-to-image (T2I) models compare generated images prompted in a test language to an expected image distribution over a concept set. One such benchmark, “Conceptual Coverage Across Languages” (CoCo-CroLa), assesses the tangible noun inventory of T2I mo…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multi-LogiEval: Towards Evaluating Multi-Step Logical Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to exhibit remarkable performance in natural language understanding tasks, there is a crucial need to measure their ability for human-like multi-step logical reasoning. Existing logical reasoning evaluation benchmarks often focus primarily on simplistic singl…

2024

On the Robustness of Language Guidance for Low-Level Vision Tasks: Findings from Depth Estimation

CVPR 2024poster

Recent advances in monocular depth estimation have been made by incorporating natural language as additional guidance. Although yielding impressive results the impact of the language prior particularly in terms of generalization and robustness remains unexplored. In this paper we address this gap by…

2024

Step-by-Step Reasoning to Solve Grid Puzzles: Where do LLMs Falter?

EMNLP 2024main

Solving grid puzzles involves a significant amount of logical reasoning. Hence, it is a good domain to evaluate reasoning capability of a model which can then guide us to improve the reasoning ability of models. However, most existing works evaluate only the final predicted answer of a puzzle, witho…

2024

The Art of Defending: A Systematic Evaluation and Analysis of LLM Defense Strategies on Safety and Over-Defensiveness

ACL 2024findings

As Large Language Models (LLMs) play an increasingly pivotal role in natural language processing applications, their safety concerns become critical areas of NLP research. This has resulted in the development of various LLM defense strategies. Unfortunately, despite the shared goal of improving the…

2024

TripletCLIP: Improving Compositional Reasoning of CLIP via Synthetic Vision-Language Negatives

NeurIPS 2024poster

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) models maximize the mutual information between text and visual modalities to learn representations. This makes the nature of the training data a significant factor in the efficacy of CLIP for downstream tasks. However, the lack of compositional diversity…

2023

A Study on the Efficiency and Generalization of Light Hybrid Retrievers

ACL 2023short

Hybrid retrievers can take advantage of both sparse and dense retrievers. Previous hybrid retrievers leverage indexing-heavy dense retrievers. In this work, we study “Is it possible to reduce the indexing memory of hybrid retrievers without sacrificing performance”? Driven by this question, we lever…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Unified Evaluation Framework for Novelty Detection and Accommodation in NLP with an Instantiation in Authorship Attribution

ACL 2023findings

State-of-the-art natural language processing models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance in ‘closed-world’ settings where all the labels in the evaluation set are known at training time. However, in real-world settings, ‘novel’ instances that do not belong to any known class are often o…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

End-to-end Knowledge Retrieval with Multi-modal Queries

ACL 2023long

We investigate knowledge retrieval with multi-modal queries, i.e. queries containing information split across image and text inputs, a challenging task that differs from previous work on cross-modal retrieval. We curate a new dataset called ReMuQ for benchmarking progress on this task. ReMuQ require…

2023

InstructExcel: A Benchmark for Natural Language Instruction in Excel

EMNLP 2023long findings

With the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) we can solve increasingly more complex NLP tasks across various domains, including spreadsheets. This work investigates whether LLMs can generate code (Excel OfficeScripts, a TypeScript API for executing many tasks in Excel) that solves Excel specif…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

LogicAttack: Adversarial Attacks for Evaluating Logical Consistency of Natural Language Inference

EMNLP 2023short findings

Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, ChatGPT, and FLAN have led to impressive progress in Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks. However, these models may rely on simple heuristics or artifacts in the evaluation data to achieve their high performance, which suggests that they still…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

CRIPP-VQA: Counterfactual Reasoning about Implicit Physical Properties via Video Question Answering

EMNLP 2022main

Videos often capture objects, their visible properties, their motion, and the interactions between different objects. Objects also have physical properties such as mass, which the imaging pipeline is unable to directly capture. However, these properties can be estimated by utilizing cues from relati…

2022

Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions

ACL 2022long

Humans (e.g., crowdworkers) have a remarkable ability in solving different tasks, by simply reading textual instructions that define them and looking at a few examples. Despite the success of the conventional supervised learning on individual datasets, such models often struggle with generalization…

Cited by 697SourcePDFScholar
2022

Generalized but not Robust? Comparing the Effects of Data Modification Methods on Out-of-Domain Generalization and Adversarial Robustness

ACL 2022findings

Data modification, either via additional training datasets, data augmentation, debiasing, and dataset filtering, has been proposed as an effective solution for generalizing to out-of-domain (OOD) inputs, in both natural language processing and computer vision literature. However, the effect of data…

2022

ILDAE: Instance-Level Difficulty Analysis of Evaluation Data

ACL 2022long

Knowledge of difficulty level of questions helps a teacher in several ways, such as estimating students’ potential quickly by asking carefully selected questions and improving quality of examination by modifying trivial and hard questions. Can we extract such benefits of instance difficulty in Natur…

2022

Improving Biomedical Information Retrieval with Neural Retrievers

AAAI 2022technical

Information retrieval (IR) is essential in search engines and dialogue systems as well as natural language processing tasks such as open-domain question answering. IR serve an important function in the biomedical domain, where content and sources of scientific knowledge may evolve rapidly. Although…

2022

In-BoXBART: Get Instructions into Biomedical Multi-Task Learning

NAACL 2022findings

Single-task models have proven pivotal in solving specific tasks; however, they have limitations in real-world applications where multi-tasking is necessary and domain shifts are exhibited. Recently, instructional prompts have shown significant improvement towards multi-task generalization; however,…

2022

Investigating Selective Prediction Approaches Across Several Tasks in IID, OOD, and Adversarial Settings

ACL 2022findings

In order to equip NLP systems with ‘selective prediction’ capability, several task-specific approaches have been proposed. However, which approaches work best across tasks or even if they consistently outperform the simplest baseline MaxProb remains to be explored. To this end, we systematically stu…

Cited by 55SourcePDFScholar
2022

LILA: A Unified Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning

EMNLP 2022main

Mathematical reasoning skills are essential for general-purpose intelligentsystems to perform tasks from grocery shopping to climate modeling.Towards evaluating and improving AI systems in this domain, we proposeLILA, a unified mathematical reasoning benchmark consisting of 23 diversetasks along fou…

2022

Learning Action-Effect Dynamics for Hypothetical Vision-Language Reasoning Task

EMNLP 2022finding

‘Actions’ play a vital role in how humans interact with the world. Thus, autonomous agents that would assist us in everyday tasks also require the capability to perform ‘Reasoning about Actions & Change’ (RAC). This has been an important research direction in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general,…

2022

Less is More: Summary of Long Instructions is Better for Program Synthesis

EMNLP 2022main

Despite the success of large pre-trained language models (LMs) such as Codex, they show below-par performance on the larger and more complicated programming related questions. We show that LMs benefit from the summarized version of complicated questions. Our findings show that superfluous informatio…

2022

Lexi: Self-Supervised Learning of the UI Language

EMNLP 2022finding

Humans can learn to operate the user interface (UI) of an application by reading an instruction manual or how-to guide. Along with text, these resources include visual content such as UI screenshots and images of application icons referenced in the text. We explore how to leverage this data to learn…

2022

NumGLUE: A Suite of Fundamental yet Challenging Mathematical Reasoning Tasks

ACL 2022long

Given the ubiquitous nature of numbers in text, reasoning with numbers to perform simple calculations is an important skill of AI systems. While many datasets and models have been developed to this end, state-of-the-art AI systems are brittle; failing to perform the underlying mathematical reasoning…

Cited by 101SourcePDFScholar
2022

Reframing Instructional Prompts to GPTk’s Language

ACL 2022findings

What kinds of instructional prompts are easier to follow for Language Models (LMs)? We study this question by conducting extensive empirical analysis that shed light on important features of successful instructional prompts. Specifically, we study several classes of reframing techniques for manual r…

Cited by 215SourcePDFScholar
2022

Semantically Distributed Robust Optimization for Vision-and-Language Inference

ACL 2022findings

Analysis of vision-and-language models has revealed their brittleness under linguistic phenomena such as paraphrasing, negation, textual entailment, and word substitutions with synonyms or antonyms. While data augmentation techniques have been designed to mitigate against these failure modes, method…

2022

To Find Waldo You Need Contextual Cues: Debiasing Who’s Waldo

ACL 2022short

We present a debiased dataset for the Person-centric Visual Grounding (PCVG) task first proposed by Cui et al. (2021) in the Who’s Waldo dataset. Given an image and a caption, PCVG requires pairing up a person’s name mentioned in a caption with a bounding box that points to the person in the image.…

2022

Unsupervised Natural Language Inference Using PHL Triplet Generation

ACL 2022findings

Transformer-based models achieve impressive performance on numerous Natural Language Inference (NLI) benchmarks when trained on respective training datasets. However, in certain cases, training samples may not be available or collecting them could be time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this wo…

2021

Attribute-Guided Adversarial Training for Robustness to Natural Perturbations

AAAI 2021technical

While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings. In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbation…

2021

CLEVR_HYP: A Challenge Dataset and Baselines for Visual Question Answering with Hypothetical Actions over Images

NAACL 2021long

Most existing research on visual question answering (VQA) is limited to information explicitly present in an image or a video. In this paper, we take visual understanding to a higher level where systems are challenged to answer questions that involve mentally simulating the hypothetical consequences…

2021

Investigating Numeracy Learning Ability of a Text-to-Text Transfer Model

EMNLP 2021finding

The transformer-based pre-trained language models have been tremendously successful in most of the conventional NLP tasks. But they often struggle in those tasks where numerical understanding is required. Some possible reasons can be the tokenizers and pre-training objectives which are not specifica…

2021

Weakly Supervised Relative Spatial Reasoning for Visual Question Answering

ICCV 2021poster

Vision-and-language (V&L) reasoning necessitates perception of visual concepts such as objects and actions, understanding semantics and language grounding, and reasoning about the interplay between the two modalities. One crucial aspect of visual reasoning is spatial understanding, which involves un…

Cited by 26PDFScholar
2021

Weakly-Supervised Visual-Retriever-Reader for Knowledge-based Question Answering

EMNLP 2021main

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) requires answering questions with external knowledge in addition to the content of images. One dataset that is mostly used in evaluating knowledge-based VQA is OK-VQA, but it lacks a gold standard knowledge corpus for retrieval. Existing work leverage…

2020

Language-Conditioned Imitation Learning for Robot Manipulation Tasks

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Imitation learning is a popular approach for teaching motor skills to robots. However, most approaches focus on extracting policy parameters from execution traces alone (i.e., motion trajectories and perceptual data). No adequate communication channel exists between the human expert and the robot to…

2020

VQA-LOL: Visual Question Answering under the Lens of Logic

ECCV 2020poster

Logical connectives and their implications on the meaning of a natural language sentence are a fundamental aspect of understanding. In this paper, we investigate whether visual question answering (VQA) systems trained to answer a question about an image, are able to answer the logical composition of…

Cited by 103SourcePDFScholar