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Emily Cheng

6 accepted papers

2026

GenCtrl -- A Formal Controllability Toolkit for Generative Models

ICLR 2026poster

As generative models become ubiquitous, there is a critical need for fine-grained control over the generation process. Yet, while controlled generation methods from prompting to fine-tuning proliferate, a fundamental question remains unanswered: are these models truly controllable in the first place…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Emergence of a High-Dimensional Abstraction Phase in Language Transformers

ICLR 2025poster

A language model (LM) is a mapping from a linguistic context to an output token. However, much remains to be known about this mapping, including how its geometric properties relate to its function. We take a high-level geometric approach to its analysis, observing, across five pre-trained transforme…

2025

Geometric Signatures of Compositionality Across a Language Model’s Lifetime

ACL 2025long

By virtue of linguistic compositionality, few syntactic rules and a finite lexicon can generate an unbounded number of sentences. That is, language, though seemingly high-dimensional, can be explained using relatively few degrees of freedom. An open question is whether contemporary language models (…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Bridging Information-Theoretic and Geometric Compression in Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

For a language model (LM) to faithfully model human language, it must compress vast, potentially infinite information into relatively few dimensions. We propose analyzing compression in (pre-trained) LMs from two points of view: geometric and information-theoretic. We demonstrate that the two views…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

On the Correspondence between Compositionality and Imitation in Emergent Neural Communication

ACL 2023findings

Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to improve communication performance; however, its impact on imitat…