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Howard Chen

11 accepted papers

2026

Retaining by Doing: The Role of On-Policy Data in Mitigating Forgetting

ICML 2026poster

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this phenomenon, we systematically compare the forgetting patter…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

COLLIE: Systematic Construction of Constrained Text Generation Tasks

ICLR 2024poster

Text generation under constraints have seen increasing interests in natural language processing, especially with the rapidly improving capabilities of large language models. However, existing benchmarks for constrained generation usually focus on fixed constraint types (e.g. generate a sentence cont…

2024

CharXiv: Charting Gaps in Realistic Chart Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

NeurIPS 2024poster

Chart understanding plays a pivotal role when applying Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to real-world tasks such as analyzing scientific papers or financial reports. However, existing datasets often focus on oversimplified and homogeneous charts with template-based questions, leading to an o…

2024

Language Models as Science Tutors

ICML 2024poster

NLP has recently made exciting progress toward training language models (LMs) with strong scientific problem-solving skills. However, model development has not focused on real-life use-cases of LMs for science, including applications in education that require processing long scientific documents. To…

2023

C-STS: Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity

EMNLP 2023long main

Semantic textual similarity (STS) has been a cornerstone task in NLP that measures the degree of similarity between a pair of sentences, with applications in information retrieval, question answering, and embedding methods. However, it is an inherently ambiguous task, with the sentence similarity de…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

What In-Context Learning “Learns” In-Context: Disentangling Task Recognition and Task Learning

ACL 2023findings

Large language models (LLMs) exploit in-context learning (ICL) to solve tasks with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not yet well-understood. Some works suggest that LLMs only recall already learned concepts from pre-training, while others hint that ICL performs implicit learning ove…

2022

WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents

NeurIPS 2022accept

Most existing benchmarks for grounding language in interactive environments either lack realistic linguistic elements, or prove difficult to scale up due to substantial human involvement in the collection of data or feedback signals. We develop WebShop – a simulated e-commerce website environment wi…

2021

Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

NAACL 2021long

Existing goal-oriented dialogue datasets focus mainly on identifying slots and values. However, customer support interactions in reality often involve agents following multi-step procedures derived from explicitly-defined company policies as well. To study customer service dialogue systems in more r…

2019

TOUCHDOWN: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environments

CVPR 2019poster

We study the problem of jointly reasoning about language and vision through a navigation and spatial reasoning task. We introduce the Touchdown task and dataset, where an agent must first follow navigation instructions in a Street View environment to a goal position, and then guess a location in its…

Cited by 433PDFcodeScholar