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Lily H Zhang

7 accepted papers

2026

Cultivating Pluralism In Algorithmic Monoculture: The Community Alignment Dataset

ICLR 2026poster

How can large language models (LLMs) serve users with varying preferences that may conflict across cultural, political, or other dimensions? To advance this challenge, this paper establishes four key results. First, we demonstrate, through a large-scale multilingual human study with representative s…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Learning from others' mistakes: Finetuning machine translation models with span-level error annotations

ICML 2025poster

Despite growing interest in incorporating feedback to improve language models, most efforts focus only on sequence-level annotations. In this work, we explore the potential of utilizing fine-grained span-level annotations from offline datasets to improve model quality. We develop a simple finetuning…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Preference Learning Algorithms Do Not Learn Preference Rankings

NeurIPS 2024poster

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the conventional wisdom that preference learning trains models to ass…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2023

Don’t blame Dataset Shift! Shortcut Learning due to Gradients and Cross Entropy

NeurIPS 2023poster

Common explanations for shortcut learning assume that the shortcut improves prediction only under the training distribution. Thus, models trained in the typical way by minimizing log-loss using gradient descent, which we call default-ERM, should utilize the shortcut. However, even when the stable fe…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2023

Robustness to Spurious Correlations Improves Semantic Out-of-Distribution Detection

AAAI 2023technical

Methods which utilize the outputs or feature representations of predictive models have emerged as promising approaches for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection of image inputs. However, as demonstrated in previous work, these methods struggle to detect OOD inputs that share nuisance values (e.g. back…

2022

Out-of-distribution Generalization in the Presence of Nuisance-Induced Spurious Correlations

ICLR 2022poster

In many prediction problems, spurious correlations are induced by a changing relationship between the label and a nuisance variable that is also correlated with the covariates. For example, in classifying animals in natural images, the background, which is a nuisance, can predict the type of animal.…