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Mahdi Namazifar

13 accepted papers

2025

Split-Merge: Scalable and Memory-Efficient Merging of Expert LLMs

EMNLP 2025

We introduce a zero-shot merging framework for large language models (LLMs) that consolidates specialized domain experts into a single model without any further training. Our core contribution lies in leveraging relative task vectors—difference representations encoding each expert’s unique traits wi

2025

Toward Engineering AGI: Benchmarking the Engineering Design Capabilities of LLMs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Modern engineering, spanning electrical, mechanical, aerospace, civil, and computer disciplines, stands as a cornerstone of human civilization and the foundation of our society. However, engineering design poses a fundamentally different challenge for large language models (LLMs) compared with tradi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

CESAR: Automatic Induction of Compositional Instructions for Multi-turn Dialogs

EMNLP 2023long main

Instruction-based multitasking has played a critical role in the success of large language models (LLMs) in multi-turn dialog applications. While publicly available LLMs have shown promising performance, when exposed to complex instructions with multiple constraints, they lag against state-of-the-ar…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

KILM: Knowledge Injection into Encoder-Decoder Language Models

ACL 2023long

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been shown to retain implicit knowledge within their parameters. To enhance this implicit knowledge, we propose Knowledge Injection into Language Models (KILM), a novel approach that injects entity-related knowledge into encoder-decoder PLMs, via a gener…

2022

ALFRED-L: Investigating the Role of Language for Action Learning in Interactive Visual Environments

EMNLP 2022main

Embodied Vision and Language Task Completion requires an embodied agent to interpret natural language instructions and egocentric visual observations to navigate through and interact with environments. In this work, we examine ALFRED, a challenging benchmark for embodied task completion, with the go…

2022

Attention Biasing and Context Augmentation for Zero-Shot Control of Encoder-Decoder Transformers for Natural Language Generation

AAAI 2022technical

Controlling neural network-based models for natural language generation (NLG) to realize desirable attributes in the generated outputs has broad applications in numerous areas such as machine translation, document summarization, and dialog systems. Approaches that enable such control in a zero-shot…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Empowering parameter-efficient transfer learning by recognizing the kernel structure in self-attention

NAACL 2022findings

The massive amount of trainable parameters in the pre-trained language models (PLMs) makes them hard to be deployed to multiple downstream tasks. To address this issue, parameter-efficient transfer learning methods have been proposed to tune only a few parameters during fine-tuning while freezing th…

2022

Enhancing Knowledge Selection for Grounded Dialogues via Document Semantic Graphs

NAACL 2022long

Providing conversation models with background knowledge has been shown to make open-domain dialogues more informative and engaging. Existing models treat knowledge selection as a sentence ranking or classification problem where each sentence is handled individually, ignoring the internal semantic co…

2022

Inducer-tuning: Connecting Prefix-tuning and Adapter-tuning

EMNLP 2022main

Prefix-tuning, or more generally continuous prompt tuning, has become an essential paradigm of parameter-efficient transfer learning. Using a large pre-trained language model (PLM), prefix-tuning can obtain strong performance by training only a small portion of parameters. In this paper, we propose…

2021

Language Model is all You Need: Natural Language Understanding as Question Answering

ICASSP 2021accepted

Different flavors of transfer learning have shown tremendous impact in advancing research and applications of machine learning. In this work we study the use of a certain family of transfer learning, where the target domain is mapped to the source domain. Specifically we map Natural Language Underst…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Exploration Based Language Learning for Text-Based Games

IJCAI 2020poster

This work presents an exploration and imitation-learning-based agent capable of state-of-the-art performance in playing text-based computer games. These games are of interest as they can be seen as a testbed for language understanding, problem-solving, and language generation by artificial agents.…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Joint Contextual Modeling for ASR Correction and Language Understanding

ICASSP 2020accepted

The quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) is critical to Dialogue Systems as ASR errors propagate to and directly impact downstream tasks such as language understanding (LU). In this paper, we propose multi-task neural approaches to perform contextual language correction on ASR outputs joint…

Cited by 0SourceScholar