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Michael J. Ryan

11 accepted papers

2026

AutoMetrics: Approximate Human Judgments with Automatically Generated Evaluators

ICLR 2026poster

Evaluating user-facing AI applications remains a central challenge, especially in open-ended domains such as travel planning, clinical note generation, or dialogue. The gold standard is user feedback (e.g., thumbs up/down) or behavioral signals (e.g., retention), but these are often scarce in protot…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026oral

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adapted to downstream tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which often require thousands of rollouts to learn new tasks. We argue that the interpretable nature of language often provides a much ric…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Distilling an End-to-End Voice Assistant Without Instruction Training Data

ACL 2025long

Voice assistants, such as Siri and Google Assistant, typically model audio and text separately, resulting in lost speech information and increased complexity. Recent efforts to address this with end-to-end Speech Large Language Models (speech-in, text-out) trained with supervised finetuning (SFT) ha…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LangProBe: a Language Program Benchmark

EMNLP 2025

Composing language models (LMs) into multi-step language programs and automatically optimizing their modular prompts is now a mainstream paradigm for building AI systems, but the tradeoffs in this space have only scarcely been studied before. We introduce LangProBe, the first large-scale benchmark f

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Mind the Gap: Static and Interactive Evaluations of Large Audio Models

ACL 2025long

As AI chatbots become ubiquitous, voice interaction presents a compelling way to enable rapid, high-bandwidth communication for both semantic and social signals. This has driven research into Large Audio Models (LAMs) to power voice-native experiences. However, aligning LAM development with user goa…

2025

SynthesizeMe! Inducing Persona-Guided Prompts for Personalized Reward Models in LLMs

ACL 2025long

Recent calls for pluralistic alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) encourage adapting models to diverse user preferences. However, most prior work on personalized reward models heavily rely on additional identity information, such as demographic details or a predefined set of preference categori…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Having Beer after Prayer? Measuring Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

As the reach of large language models (LMs) expands globally, their ability to cater to diverse cultural contexts becomes crucial. Despite advancements in multilingual capabilities, models are not designed with appropriate cultural nuances. In this paper, we show that multilingual and Arabic monolin…

2024

Optimizing Instructions and Demonstrations for Multi-Stage Language Model Programs

EMNLP 2024main

Language Model Programs, i.e. sophisticated pipelines of modular language model (LM) calls, are increasingly advancing NLP tasks, but they require crafting prompts that are jointly effective for all modules. We study prompt optimization for LM programs, i.e. how to update these prompts to maximize a…

2024

ReadMe++: Benchmarking Multilingual Language Models for Multi-Domain Readability Assessment

EMNLP 2024main

We present a comprehensive evaluation of large language models for multilingual readability assessment. Existing evaluation resources lack domain and language diversity, limiting the ability for cross-domain and cross-lingual analyses. This paper introduces ReadMe++, a multilingual multi-domain data…

2023

Revisiting non-English Text Simplification: A Unified Multilingual Benchmark

ACL 2023long

Recent advancements in high-quality, large-scale English resources have pushed the frontier of English Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) research. However, less work has been done on multilingual text simplification due to the lack of a diverse evaluation benchmark that covers complex-simple sente…