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Esin Durmus

12 accepted papers

2025

SafeArena: Evaluating the Safety of Autonomous Web Agents

ICML 2025poster

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly proficient at solving web-based tasks. With this capability comes a greater risk of misuse for malicious purposes, such as posting misinformation in an online forum or selling illicit substances on a website. To evaluate these risks, we propose SafeArena, a…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

NLP Systems That Can’t Tell Use from Mention Censor Counterspeech, but Teaching the Distinction Helps

NAACL 2024long

The use of words to convey speaker’s intent is traditionally distinguished from the ‘mention’ of words for quoting what someone said, or pointing out properties of a word. Here we show that computationally modeling this use-mention distinction is crucial for dealing with counterspeech online. Counte…

2024

Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a popular technique for training high-quality AI assistants. However, RLHF may also encourage model responses that match user beliefs over truthful responses, a behavior known as sycophancy. We investigate the prevalence of sycophancy in RLHF-trai…

2023

Contrastive Error Attribution for Finetuned Language Models

ACL 2023long

Recent work has identified noisy and misannotated data as a core cause of hallucinations and unfaithful outputs in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. Consequently, identifying and removing these examples is a key open challenge in creating reliable NLG systems. In this work, we introduce a fra…

2023

Marked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Models

ACL 2023long

To recognize and mitigate harms from large language models (LLMs), we need to understand the prevalence and nuances of stereotypes in LLM outputs. Toward this end, we present Marked Personas, a prompt-based method to measure stereotypes in LLMs for intersectional demographic groups without any lexic…

2023

Towards Reference-free Text Simplification Evaluation with a BERT Siamese Network Architecture

ACL 2023findings

Text simplification (TS) aims to modify sentences to make their both content and structure easier to understand. Traditional n-gram matching-based TS evaluation metrics heavily rely on the exact token match and human-annotated simplified sentences. In this paper, we present a novel neural-network-ba…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?

ICML 2023oral

Language models (LMs) are increasingly being used in open-ended contexts, where the opinions they reflect in response to subjective queries can have a profound impact, both on user satisfaction, and shaping the views of society at large. We put forth a quantitative framework to investigate the opini…

2022

Faithful or Extractive? On Mitigating the Faithfulness-Abstractiveness Trade-off in Abstractive Summarization

ACL 2022long

Despite recent progress in abstractive summarization, systems still suffer from faithfulness errors. While prior work has proposed models that improve faithfulness, it is unclear whether the improvement comes from an increased level of extractiveness of the model outputs as one naive way to improve…

2022

Improving Faithfulness by Augmenting Negative Summaries from Fake Documents

EMNLP 2022main

Current abstractive summarization systems tend to hallucinate content that is unfaithful to the source document, posing a risk of misinformation. To mitigate hallucination, we must teach the model to distinguish hallucinated summaries from faithful ones. However, the commonly used maximum likelihood…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2022

Spurious Correlations in Reference-Free Evaluation of Text Generation

ACL 2022long

Model-based, reference-free evaluation metricshave been proposed as a fast and cost-effectiveapproach to evaluate Natural Language Generation(NLG) systems. Despite promising recentresults, we find evidence that reference-freeevaluation metrics of summarization and dialoggeneration may be relying on…