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Melanie Sclar

11 accepted papers

2025

AI as Humanity’s Salieri: Quantifying Linguistic Creativity of Language Models via Systematic Attribution of Machine Text against Web Text

ICLR 2025oral

Creativity has long been considered one of the most difficult aspect of human intelligence for AI to mimic. However, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, has raised questions about whether AI can match or even surpass human creativity. We present CREATIVITY INDEX as the first step…

2025

Explore Theory of Mind: program-guided adversarial data generation for theory of mind reasoning

ICLR 2025poster

Do large language models (LLMs) have theory of mind? A plethora of papers and benchmarks have been introduced to evaluate if current models have been able to develop this key ability of social intelligence. However, all rely on limited datasets with simple patterns that can potentially lead to probl…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Phenomenal Yet Puzzling: Testing Inductive Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models with Hypothesis Refinement

ICLR 2024oral

The ability to derive underlying principles from a handful of observations and then generalize to novel situations---known as inductive reasoning---is central to human intelligence. Prior work suggests that language models (LMs) often fall short on inductive reasoning, despite achieving impressive s…

2024

Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting

ICLR 2024poster

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted as a fundamental component of language technologies, it is crucial to accurately characterize their performance. Because choices in prompt design can strongly influence model behavior, this design process is critical in effectively using any modern pre-tra…

2024

The Unlocking Spell on Base LLMs: Rethinking Alignment via In-Context Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Alignment tuning has become the de facto standard practice for enabling base large language models (LLMs) to serve as open-domain AI assistants. The alignment tuning process typically involves instruction learning through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference tuning via reinforcement learning…

Cited by 169SourcePDFScholar
2023

BotPercent: Estimating Bot Populations in Twitter Communities

EMNLP 2023long findings

Twitter bot detection is vital in combating misinformation and safeguarding the integrity of social media discourse. While malicious bots are becoming more and more sophisticated and personalized, standard bot detection approaches are still agnostic to social environments (henceforth, communities) t…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

FANToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind in Interactions

EMNLP 2023long main

Theory of mind (ToM) evaluations currently focus on testing models using passive narratives that inherently lack interactivity. We introduce FANToM, a new benchmark designed to stress-test ToM within information-asymmetric conversational contexts via question answering. Our benchmark draws upon impo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems. This begs the question: Are these errors incidental, or do they si…

2023

Minding Language Models’ (Lack of) Theory of Mind: A Plug-and-Play Multi-Character Belief Tracker

ACL 2023long

Theory of Mind (ToM)—the ability to reason about the mental states of other people—is a key element of our social intelligence. Yet, despite their ever more impressive performance, large-scale neural language models still lack basic theory of mind capabilities out-of-the-box. We posit that simply sc…

2022

Referee: Reference-Free Sentence Summarization with Sharper Controllability through Symbolic Knowledge Distillation

EMNLP 2022main

We present Referee, a novel framework for sentence summarization that can be trained reference-free (i.e., requiring no gold summaries for supervision), while allowing direct control for compression ratio. Our work is the first to demonstrate that reference-free, controlled sentence summarization is…