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James Thorne

30 accepted papers

2026

Margin-Aware Preference Optimization for Aligning Diffusion Models Without Reference

AAAI 2026technical

Modern preference alignment methods, such as DPO, rely on divergence regularization to a reference model for training stability—but this creates a fundamental problem we call "reference mismatch." In this paper, we investigate the negative impacts of reference mismatch in aligning text-to-image (T2I

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Cross-lingual Transfer of Reward Models in Multilingual Alignment

NAACL 2025short

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) is shown to largely benefit from precise reward models (RMs). However, recent studies in reward modeling schemes are skewed towards English, limiting the applicability of RLHF in multilingual alignments. In this work, we investigate the cross-lingual…

2025

Diffusion Models Through a Global Lens: Are They Culturally Inclusive?

ACL 2025long

Text-to-image diffusion models have recently enabled the creation of visually compelling, detailed images from textual prompts. However, their ability to accurately represent various cultural nuances remains an open question. In our work, we introduce CULTDIFF benchmark, evaluating whether state-of-…

2025

From Evidence to Belief: A Bayesian Epistemology Approach to Language Models

NAACL 2025long

This paper investigates the knowledge of language models from the perspective of Bayesian epistemology. We explore how language models adjust their confidence and responses when presented with evidence with varying levels of informativeness and reliability. To study these properties, we create a dat…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

I0T: Embedding Standardization Method Towards Zero Modality Gap

ACL 2025long

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) enables zero-shot inference in downstream tasks such as image-text retrieval and classification. However, recent works extending CLIP suffer from the issue of *modality gap*, which arises when the image and text embeddings are projected to disparate mani…

2025

Linguistic Generalizability of Test-Time Scaling in Mathematical Reasoning

ACL 2025long

Scaling pre-training compute has proven effective for achieving multilinguality, but does the same hold for test-time scaling? In this work, we introduce **MCLM**, a multilingual math benchmark featuring competition-level problems in 55 languages. We then compare three test-time scaling methods—Outc…

2025

On the Robustness of Reward Models for Language Model Alignment

ICML 2025poster

The Bradley-Terry (BT) model is widely practiced in reward modeling for reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Despite its effectiveness, reward models (RMs) trained with BT model loss as one-way classifiers are prone to over-optimization, losing generalizability to unseen inputs. In thi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Sightation Counts: Leveraging Sighted User Feedback in Building a BLV-aligned Dataset of Diagram Descriptions

ACL 2025long

Often, the needs and visual abilities differ between the annotator group and the end user group. Generating detailed diagram descriptions for blind and low-vision (BLV) users is one such challenging domain. Sighted annotators could describe visuals with ease, but existing studies have shown that dir…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

BEnQA: A Question Answering Benchmark for Bengali and English

ACL 2024findings

In this study, we introduce BEnQA, a dataset comprising parallel Bengali and English exam questions for middle and high school levels in Bangladesh. Our dataset consists of approximately 5K questions covering several subjects in science with different types of questions, including factual, applicati…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Block Transformer: Global-to-Local Language Modeling for Fast Inference

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce the Block Transformer which adopts hierarchical global-to-local modeling to autoregressive transformers to mitigate the inference bottlenecks associated with self-attention. Self-attention requires the key-value (KV) cache of all previous sequences to be retrieved from memory at every d…

2024

CLIcK: A Benchmark Dataset of Cultural and Linguistic Intelligence in Korean

COLING 2024main

Despite the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) for the Korean language, there remains an obvious lack of benchmark datasets that test the requisite Korean cultural and linguistic knowledge. Because many existing Korean benchmark datasets are derived from the English counterparts throu…

2024

FLASK: Fine-grained Language Model Evaluation based on Alignment Skill Sets

ICLR 2024spotlight

Evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenging because instruction-following necessitates alignment with human values and the required set of skills varies depending on the instruction. However, previous studies have mainly focused on coarse-grained evaluation (i.e. overall preference-bas…

2024

Prometheus: Inducing Fine-Grained Evaluation Capability in Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Recently, GPT-4 has become the de facto evaluator for long-form text generated by large language models (LLMs). However, for practitioners and researchers with large and custom evaluation tasks, GPT-4 is unreliable due to its closed-source nature, uncontrolled versioning, and prohibitive costs. In t…

2024

Stable Language Model Pre-training by Reducing Embedding Variability

EMNLP 2024main

Stable pre-training is essential for achieving better-performing language models. However, tracking pre-training stability is impractical due to high computational costs. We study Token Embedding Variability as a simple proxy to estimate pre-training stability. We theoretically and empirically demon…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Disentangling Structure and Style: Political Bias Detection in News by Inducing Document Hierarchy

EMNLP 2023long findings

We address an important gap in detecting political bias in news articles. Previous works that perform document classification can be influenced by the writing style of each news outlet, leading to overfitting and limited generalizability. Our approach overcomes this limitation by considering both th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

FactKG: Fact Verification via Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs

ACL 2023long

In real world applications, knowledge graphs (KG) are widely used in various domains (e.g. medical applications and dialogue agents). However, for fact verification, KGs have not been adequately utilized as a knowledge source. KGs can be a valuable knowledge source in fact verification due to their…

2023

HARE: Explainable Hate Speech Detection with Step-by-Step Reasoning

EMNLP 2023short findings

With the proliferation of social media, accurate detection of hate speech has become critical to ensure safety online. To combat nuanced forms of hate speech, it is important to identify and thoroughly explain hate speech to help users understand its harmful effects. Recent benchmarks have attempted…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

VisAlign: Dataset for Measuring the Alignment between AI and Humans in Visual Perception

NeurIPS 2023poster

AI alignment refers to models acting towards human-intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. Analyzing the similarity between models and humans can be a proxy measure for ensuring AI safety. In this paper, we focus on the models' visual perception alignment with humans, further referred to…

2021

Database reasoning over text

ACL 2021long

Neural models have shown impressive performance gains in answering queries from natural language text. However, existing works are unable to support database queries, such as “List/Count all female athletes who were born in 20th century”, which require reasoning over sets of relevant facts with oper…

2021

FEVEROUS: Fact Extraction and VERification Over Unstructured and Structured information

NeurIPS 2021poster

Fact verification has attracted a lot of attention in the machine learning and natural language processing communities, as it is one of the key methods for detecting misinformation. Existing large-scale benchmarks for this task have focused mostly on textual sources, i.e. unstructured information, a…

Cited by 270SourcecodeScholar
2021

KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks

NAACL 2021long

Challenging problems such as open-domain question answering, fact checking, slot filling and entity linking require access to large, external knowledge sources. While some models do well on individual tasks, developing general models is difficult as each task might require computationally expensive…