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Mark Yatskar

23 accepted papers

2026

Flattery, Fluff, and Fog: Diagnosing and Mitigating Idiosyncratic Biases in Preference Models

ICLR 2026poster

Language models serve as proxies for human preference judgements in alignment and evaluation, yet they exhibit systematic miscalibration, prioritizing superficial patterns over substantive qualities. This bias manifests as overreliance on features like length, structure, and style, leading to issues…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

A Dataset for Distilling Knowledge Priors from Literature for Therapeutic Design

NeurIPS 2025poster

AI-driven discovery can greatly reduce design time and enhance new therapeutics' effectiveness. Models using simulators explore broad design spaces but risk violating implicit constraints due to a lack of experimental priors. For example, in a new analysis across diverse models on the GuacaMol bench…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Contra4: Evaluating Contrastive Cross-Modal Reasoning in Audio, Video, Image, and 3D

EMNLP 2025

Real-world decision-making often begins with identifying which modality contains the most relevant information for a given query. While recent multimodal models have made impressive progress in processing diverse inputs, it remains unclear whether they can reason contrastively across multiple modali

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models

CVPR 2025award

Today's most advanced vision-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed VLMs into open ones. As a result, the community has been missing foundational…

2025

Scaling Text-Rich Image Understanding via Code-Guided Synthetic Multimodal Data Generation

ACL 2025long

Reasoning about images with rich text, such as charts and documents, is a critical application of vision-language models (VLMs). However, VLMs often struggle in these domains due to the scarcity of diverse text-rich vision-language data. To address this challenge, we present CoSyn, a framework that…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ViUniT: Visual Unit Tests for More Robust Visual Programming

CVPR 2025poster

Programming based approaches to reasoning tasks have substantially expanded the types of questions models can answer about visual scenes.Yet on benchmark visual reasoning data, when answering correctly, such models produce incorrect programs 33% of the time. These models are often right for the wron…

2024

A Textbook Remedy for Domain Shifts: Knowledge Priors for Medical Image Analysis

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

While deep networks have achieved broad success in analyzing natural images, when applied to medical scans, they often fail in unexcepted situations. We investigate this challenge and focus on model sensitivity to domain shifts, such as data sampled from different hospitals or data confounded by dem…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

CoMo: Controllable Motion Generation through Language Guided Pose Code Editing

ECCV 2024poster

"Text-to-motion models excel at efficient human motion generation, but existing approaches lack fine-grained controllability over the generation process. Consequently, modifying subtle postures within a motion or inserting new actions at specific moments remains a challenge, limiting the applicabili…

2024

ExpertQA: Expert-Curated Questions and Attributed Answers

NAACL 2024long

As language models are adopted by a more sophisticated and diverse set of users, the importance of guaranteeing that they provide factually correct information supported by verifiable sources is critical across fields of study. This is especially the case for high-stakes fields, such as medicine and…

2024

Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments

CVPR 2024poster

3D simulated environments play a critical role in Embodied AI but their creation requires expertise and extensive manual effort restricting their diversity and scope. To mitigate this limitation we present Holodeck a system that generates 3D environments to match a user-supplied prompt fully automat…

2024

What if you said that differently?: How Explanation Formats Affect Human Feedback Efficacy and User Perception

NAACL 2024long

Eliciting feedback from end users of NLP models can be beneficial for improving models. However, how should we present model responses to users so they are most amenable to be corrected from user feedback? Further, what properties do users value to understand and trust responses? We answer these que…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Language in a Bottle: Language Model Guided Concept Bottlenecks for Interpretable Image Classification

CVPR 2023poster

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBM) are inherently interpretable models that factor model decisions into human-readable concepts. They allow people to easily understand why a model is failing, a critical feature for high-stakes applications. CBMs require manually specified concepts and often under-perfo…

2022

Cascading Biases: Investigating the Effect of Heuristic Annotation Strategies on Data and Models

EMNLP 2022main

Cognitive psychologists have documented that humans use cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to make quick decisions while expending less effort. While performing annotation work on crowdsourcing platforms, we hypothesize that such heuristic use among annotators cascades on to data quality and…

2022

Visualizing the Obvious: A Concreteness-based Ensemble Model for Noun Property Prediction

EMNLP 2022finding

Neural language models encode rich knowledge about entities and their relationships which can be extracted from their representations using probing. Common properties of nouns (e.g., red strawberries, small ant) are, however, more challenging to extract compared to other types of knowledge because t…

2021

Iconary: A Pictionary-Based Game for Testing Multimodal Communication with Drawings and Text

EMNLP 2021main

Communicating with humans is challenging for AIs because it requires a shared understanding of the world, complex semantics (e.g., metaphors or analogies), and at times multi-modal gestures (e.g., pointing with a finger, or an arrow in a diagram). We investigate these challenges in the context of Ic…

2021

Visual Goal-Step Inference using wikiHow

EMNLP 2021main

Understanding what sequence of steps are needed to complete a goal can help artificial intelligence systems reason about human activities. Past work in NLP has examined the task of goal-step inference for text. We introduce the visual analogue. We propose the Visual Goal-Step Inference (VGSI) task,…

2021

Visual Semantic Role Labeling for Video Understanding

CVPR 2021poster

We propose a new framework for understanding and representing related salient events in a video using visual semantic role labeling. We represent videos as a set of related events, wherein each event consists of a verb and multiple entities that fulfill various roles relevant to that event. To study…

Cited by 80PDFcodeScholar
2020

RoboTHOR: An Open Simulation-to-Real Embodied AI Platform

CVPR 2020poster

Visual recognition ecosystems (e.g. ImageNet, Pascal, COCO) have undeniably played a prevailing role in the evolution of modern computer vision. We argue that interactive and embodied visual AI has reached a stage of development similar to visual recognition prior to the advent of these ecosystems.…

Cited by 300PDFcodeScholar
2019

Balanced Datasets Are Not Enough: Estimating and Mitigating Gender Bias in Deep Image Representations

ICCV 2019poster

In this work, we present a framework to measure and mitigate intrinsic biases with respect to protected variables -such as gender- in visual recognition tasks. We show that trained models significantly amplify the association of target labels with gender beyond what one would expect from biased data…

Cited by 542PDFScholar
2018

Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing With Global Context

CVPR 2018poster

We investigate the problem of producing structured graph representations of visual scenes. Our work analyzes the role of motifs: regularly appearing substructures in scene graphs. We present new quantitative insights on such repeated structures in the Visual Genome dataset. Our analysis shows that o…

2017

Commonly Uncommon: Semantic Sparsity in Situation Recognition

CVPR 2017poster

Semantic sparsity is a common challenge in structured visual classification problems; when the output space is complex, the vast majority of the possible predictions are rarely, if ever, seen in the training set. This paper studies semantic sparsity in situation recognition, the task of producing st…

Cited by 51PDFScholar
2016

Situation Recognition: Visual Semantic Role Labeling for Image Understanding

CVPR 2016oral

This paper introduces situation recognition, the problem of producing a concise summary of the situation an image depicts including: (1) the main activity (e.g., clipping), (2) the participating actors, objects, substances, and locations (e.g., man, shears, sheep, wool, and field) and most important…

Cited by 321PDFcodeScholar