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Hootan Nakhost

8 accepted papers

2026

VISTA: A Test-Time Self-Improving Video Generation Agent

CVPR 2026

Despite rapid advances in text-to-video synthesis, generated video quality remains critically dependent on precise user prompts. Existing test-time optimization methods, successful in other domains, struggle with the multi-faceted nature of video. In this work, we introduce VISTA (Video Iterative Se

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
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
2024

Teach Better or Show Smarter? On Instructions and Exemplars in Automatic Prompt Optimization

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but their performance is heavily reliant on effective prompt engineering. Automatic prompt optimization (APO) methods are designed to automate this and can be broadly categorized into those targeting instructions (instruction optimizati…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

TextGenSHAP: Scalable Post-Hoc Explanations in Text Generation with Long Documents

ACL 2024findings

Large language models (LLMs) have attracted great interest in many real-world applications; however, their “black-box” nature necessitates scalable and faithful explanations. Shapley values have matured as an explainability method for deep learning, but extending them to LLMs is difficult due to lon…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes

ACL 2023findings

Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning…

2023

Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting

EMNLP 2023long main

A hallmark of modern large language models (LLMs) is their impressive general zero-shot and few-shot abilities, often elicited through in-context learning (ICL) via prompting. However, while highly coveted and being the most general, zero-shot performances in LLMs are still typically weaker due to t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Learning and Evaluating a Differentially Private Pre-trained Language Model

EMNLP 2021finding

Contextual language models have led to significantly better results, especially when pre-trained on the same data as the downstream task. While this additional pre-training usually improves performance, it can lead to information leakage and therefore risks the privacy of individuals mentioned in th…

Cited by 78SourcePDFScholar
2020

Interpretable Sequence Learning for Covid-19 Forecasting

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

We propose a novel approach that integrates machine learning into compartmental disease modeling (e.g., SEIR) to predict the progression of COVID-19. Our model is explainable by design as it explicitly shows how different compartments evolve and it uses interpretable encoders to incorporate covariat…

Cited by 106SourcePDFScholar