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Minjoon Seo

58 accepted papers

2026

Characterizing Pattern Matching and Its Limits on Compositional Task Structures

ICLR 2026poster

Despite impressive capabilities, LLMs' successes often rely on pattern-matching behaviors, yet these are also linked to OOD generalization failures in compositional tasks. However, behavioral studies commonly employ task setups that allow multiple generalization sources (e.g., algebraic invariances,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Early Decisions Matter: Proximity Bias and Initial Trajectory Shaping in Non-Autoregressive Diffusion Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion-based language models(dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessing this flexibility for fully non-autoregressive decoding remains an open questi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Q-Flow: Stable and Expressive Reinforcement Learning with Flow-based Policy

ICML 2026poster

There is growing interest in utilizing flow-based models as decision-making policies in reinforcement learning due to their high expressive capacity. However, effectively leveraging this expressivity for value maximization remains challenging, as naive gradient-based optimization requires backpropag…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

State-Space Hierarchical Compression with Gated Attention and Learnable Sampling for Hour-Long Video Understanding in Large Multimodal Models

AAAI 2026technical

We propose an efficient framework to compress massive video-frame features before feeding them into large multimodal models, thereby mitigating the severe token explosion arising from hour-long videos. Our design leverages a bidirectional state-space model equipped with a gated skip connection and a

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

The CoT Encyclopedia: Analyzing, Predicting, and Controlling how a Reasoning Model will Think

ICLR 2026poster

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) is an essential ingredient in effective usage of modern large language models, but our understanding of the reasoning strategies underlying these capabilities remains limited. While some prior works have attempted to categorize CoTs using predefined strategy types, such a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

How Does Vision-Language Adaptation Impact the Safety of Vision Language Models?

ICLR 2025poster

Vision-Language adaptation (VL adaptation) transforms Large Language Models (LLMs) into Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for multimodal tasks, but this process often compromises the inherent safety capabilities embedded in the original LLMs. Despite potential harmfulness due to weakened safety m…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Knowledge Entropy Decay during Language Model Pretraining Hinders New Knowledge Acquisition

ICLR 2025oral

In this work, we investigate how a model's tendency to broadly integrate its parametric knowledge evolves throughout pretraining, and how this behavior affects overall performance, particularly in terms of knowledge acquisition and forgetting. We introduce the concept of knowledge entropy, which qua…

2025

Latent Action Pretraining from Videos

ICLR 2025poster

We introduce Latent Action Pretraining for general Action models (LAPA), the first unsupervised method for pretraining Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models without ground-truth robot action labels. Existing Vision-Language-Action models require action labels typically collected by human teleoperators…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2025

Reasoning Models Better Express Their Confidence

NeurIPS 2025poster

Despite their strengths, large language models (LLMs) often fail to communicate their confidence accurately, making it difficult to assess when they might be wrong and limiting their reliability. In this work, we demonstrate that reasoning models that engage in extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reason…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

RouterRetriever: Routing over a Mixture of Expert Embedding Models

AAAI 2025technical

Information retrieval methods often rely on a single embedding model trained on large, general-domain datasets like MSMARCO. While this approach can produce a retriever with reasonable overall performance, they often underperform models trained on domain-specific data when testing on their respectiv…

2025

The BiGGen Bench: A Principled Benchmark for Fine-grained Evaluation of Language Models with Language Models

NAACL 2025long

As language models (LMs) become capable of handling a wide range of tasks, their evaluation is becoming as challenging as their development. Most generation benchmarks currently assess LMs using abstract evaluation criteria-like helpfulness and harmlessness-which often lack the flexibility and granu…

2024

Aligning Large Language Models by On-Policy Self-Judgment

ACL 2024long

Existing approaches for aligning large language models with human preferences face a trade-off that requires a separate reward model (RM) for on-policy learning. In this paper, we present a novel alignment framework, SELF-JUDGE that (1) does on-policy learning and 2) is parameter efficient, as it do…

2024

Aligning to Thousands of Preferences via System Message Generalization

NeurIPS 2024poster

Although humans inherently have diverse values, current large language model (LLM) alignment methods often assume that aligning LLMs with the general public’s preferences is optimal. A major challenge in adopting a more individualized approach to LLM alignment is its lack of scalability, as it invol…

2024

Exploring the Practicality of Generative Retrieval on Dynamic Corpora

EMNLP 2024main

Benchmarking the performance of information retrieval (IR) is mostly conducted with a fixed set of documents (static corpora). However, in realistic scenarios, this is rarely the case and the documents to be retrieved are constantly updated and added. In this paper, we focus on Generative Retrievals…

2024

FLASK: Fine-grained Language Model Evaluation based on Alignment Skill Sets

ICLR 2024spotlight

Evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenging because instruction-following necessitates alignment with human values and the required set of skills varies depending on the instruction. However, previous studies have mainly focused on coarse-grained evaluation (i.e. overall preference-bas…

2024

Hierarchical Deconstruction of LLM Reasoning: A Graph-Based Framework for Analyzing Knowledge Utilization

EMNLP 2024main

Despite the advances in large language models (LLMs), how they use their knowledge for reasoning is not yet well understood.In this study, we propose a method that deconstructs complex real-world questions into a graph, representing each question as a node with predecessors of background knowledge n…

2024

How Do Large Language Models Acquire Factual Knowledge During Pretraining?

NeurIPS 2024poster

Despite the recent observation that large language models (LLMs) can store substantial factual knowledge, there is a limited understanding of the mechanisms of how they acquire factual knowledge through pretraining. This work addresses this gap by studying how LLMs acquire factual knowledge during p…

2024

How Well Do Large Language Models Truly Ground?

NAACL 2024long

To reduce issues like hallucinations and lack of control in Large Language Models (LLMs), a common method is to generate responses by grounding on external contexts given as input, known as knowledge-augmented models. However, previous research often narrowly defines “grounding” as just having the c…

2024

Investigating the Effectiveness of Task-Agnostic Prefix Prompt for Instruction Following

AAAI 2024technical

In this paper, we present our finding that prepending a Task-Agnostic Prefix Prompt (TAPP) to the input improves the instruction-following ability of various Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference. TAPP is different from canonical prompts for LLMs in that it is a fixed prompt prepended to the…

Cited by 72SourcePDFScholar
2024

KTRL+F: Knowledge-Augmented In-Document Search

NAACL 2024long

We introduce a new problem KTRL+F, a knowledge-augmented in-document search that necessitates real-time identification of all semantic targets within a document with the awareness of external sources through a single natural query. KTRL+F addresses following unique challenges for in-document search:…

2024

LangBridge: Multilingual Reasoning Without Multilingual Supervision

ACL 2024long

We introduce LangBridge, a zero-shot approach to adapt language models for multilingual reasoning tasks without multilingual supervision. LangBridge operates by bridging two models, each specialized in different aspects: (1) one specialized in understanding multiple languages (e.g., mT5 encoder) and…

2024

On Efficient Language and Vision Assistants for Visually-Situated Natural Language Understanding: What Matters in Reading and Reasoning

EMNLP 2024main

Recent advancements in language and vision assistants have showcased impressive capabilities but suffer from a lack of transparency, limiting broader research and reproducibility. While open-source models handle general image tasks effectively, they face challenges with the high computational demand…

2024

Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Proprietary LMs such as GPT-4 are often employed to assess the quality of responses from various LMs. However, concerns including transparency, controllability, and affordability strongly motivate the development of open-source LMs specialized in evaluations. On the other hand, existing open evaluat…

2024

Prometheus-Vision: Vision-Language Model as a Judge for Fine-Grained Evaluation

ACL 2024findings

Assessing long-form responses generated by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is challenging. It not only requires checking whether the VLM follows the given instruction but also verifying whether the text output is properly grounded on the given image. Inspired by the recent approach of evaluating LMs w…

2024

Prometheus: Inducing Fine-Grained Evaluation Capability in Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Recently, GPT-4 has become the de facto evaluator for long-form text generated by large language models (LLMs). However, for practitioners and researchers with large and custom evaluation tasks, GPT-4 is unreliable due to its closed-source nature, uncontrolled versioning, and prohibitive costs. In t…

2024

REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models

NAACL 2024long

We introduce REPLUG, a retrieval-augmented language modeling framework that treats the language model (LM) as a black box and augments it with a tuneable retrieval model. Unlike prior retrieval-augmented LMs that train language models with special cross-attention mechanisms to encode the retrieved t…

2024

Self-Explore: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Language Models with Fine-grained Rewards

EMNLP 2024finding

Training on large amounts of rationales (i.e., CoT Fine-tuning) has been found effective for improving mathematical reasoning of large language models (LLMs). However, acquiring human-authored solutions or augmenting rationales from proprietary models is costly and not scalable. In this paper, we st…

2024

Semiparametric Token-Sequence Co-Supervision

ACL 2024long

In this work, we introduce a semiparametric token-sequence co-supervision training method. It trains a language model by simultaneously leveraging supervision from the traditional next token prediction loss which is calculated over the parametric token embedding space and the next sequence predictio…

2024

SuRe: Summarizing Retrievals using Answer Candidates for Open-domain QA of LLMs

ICLR 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in various natural language processing tasks, including question answering (QA) tasks. While incorporating new information with the retrieval of relevant passages is a promising way to improve QA with LLMs, the existing methods often re…

2024

Volcano: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination through Self-Feedback Guided Revision

NAACL 2024long

Large multimodal models suffer from multimodal hallucination, where they provide incorrect responses misaligned with the given visual information. Recent works have conjectured that one of the reasons behind multimodal hallucination is due to the vision encoder failing to ground on the image properl…

2023

A Bayesian Approach To Analysing Training Data Attribution In Deep Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Training data attribution (TDA) techniques find influential training data for the model's prediction on the test data of interest. They approximate the impact of down- or up-weighting a particular training sample. While conceptually useful, they are hardly applicable to deep models in practice, part…

2023

Aligning Large Language Models through Synthetic Feedback

EMNLP 2023long main

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to human values has become increasingly important as it enables sophisticated steering of LLMs. However, it requires significant human demonstrations and feedback or distillation from proprietary LLMs such as ChatGPT. In this work, we propose a novel alignment l…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

ClaimDiff: Comparing and Contrasting Claims on Contentious Issues

ACL 2023findings

With the growing importance of detecting misinformation, many studies have focused on verifying factual claims by retrieving evidence. However, canonical fact verification tasks do not apply to catching subtle differences in factually consistent claims, which might still bias the readers, especially…

2023

Efficiently Enhancing Zero-Shot Performance of Instruction Following Model via Retrieval of Soft Prompt

EMNLP 2023long findings

Enhancing the zero-shot performance of instruction-following models requires heavy computation, either by scaling the total number of training datasets or the model size. In this work, we explore how retrieval of soft prompts obtained through prompt tuning can efficiently assist hard prompts in zero…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Exploring the Benefits of Training Expert Language Models over Instruction Tuning

ICML 2023poster

Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown capabilities to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of finetuning datasets and instructions is the key component in making strong…

2023

Fixed Input Parameterization for Efficient Prompting

ACL 2023findings

Recent works have shown that attaching prompts to the input is effective at conditioning Language Models (LM) to perform specific tasks. However, prompts are always included in the input text during inference, even when they are fixed, thus incurring substantial computational and memory overhead. Al…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

Gradient Ascent Post-training Enhances Language Model Generalization

ACL 2023short

In this work, we empirically show that updating pretrained LMs (350M, 1.3B, 2.7B) with just a few steps of Gradient Ascent Post-training (GAP) on random, unlabeled text corpora enhances its zero-shot generalization capabilities across diverse NLP tasks. Specifically, we show that GAP can allow LMs t…

2023

Guess the Instruction! Flipped Learning Makes Language Models Stronger Zero-Shot Learners

ICLR 2023poster

Meta-training, which fine-tunes the language model (LM) on various downstream tasks by maximizing the likelihood of the target label given the task instruction and input instance, has improved the zero-shot task generalization performance. However, meta-trained LMs still struggle to generalize to ch…

2023

Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Models

ACL 2023long

Pretrained Language Models (LMs) memorize a vast amount of knowledge during initial pretraining, including information that may violate the privacy of personal lives and identities. Previous work addressing privacy issues for LMs has mostly focused on data preprocessing and differential privacy meth…

2023

Nonparametric Decoding for Generative Retrieval

ACL 2023findings

The generative retrieval model depends solely on the information encoded in its model parameters without external memory, its information capacity is limited and fixed. To overcome the limitation, we propose Nonparametric Decoding (Np Decoding) which can be applied to existing generative retrieval m…

2023

The CoT Collection: Improving Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning of Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning

EMNLP 2023long main

Language models (LMs) with less than 100B parameters are known to perform poorly on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in contrast to large LMs when solving unseen tasks. In this work, we aim to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step reasoning capability by instruction tuning with CoT rationales. In…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Towards standardizing Korean Grammatical Error Correction: Datasets and Annotation

ACL 2023long

Research on Korean grammatical error correction (GEC) is limited, compared to other major languages such as English. We attribute this problematic circumstance to the lack of a carefully designed evaluation benchmark for Korean GEC. In this work, we collect three datasets from different sources (Kor…

2023

Two Examples are Better than One: Context Regularization for Gradient-based Prompt Tuning

ACL 2023findings

Prompting has gained tremendous attention as an efficient method for the adaptation of large-scale language models. However, prompts often act against human intuition and report unstable performances, which has motivated methods that automatically find effective prompts. One popular approach is grad…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2022

A Multi-Task Benchmark for Korean Legal Language Understanding and Judgement Prediction

NeurIPS 2022accept

The recent advances of deep learning have dramatically changed how machine learning, especially in the domain of natural language processing, can be applied to legal domain. However, this shift to the data-driven approaches calls for larger and more diverse datasets, which are nevertheless still sma…

2022

EHRSQL: A Practical Text-to-SQL Benchmark for Electronic Health Records

NeurIPS 2022accept

We present a new text-to-SQL dataset for electronic health records (EHRs). The utterances were collected from 222 hospital staff, including physicians, nurses, insurance review and health records teams, and more. To construct the QA dataset on structured EHR data, we conducted a poll at a university…

2022

TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Models

EMNLP 2022main

Language Models (LMs) become outdated as the world changes; they often fail to perform tasks requiring recent factual information which was absent or different during training, a phenomenon called temporal misalignment. This is especially a challenging problem because the research community still la…

2022

Towards Continual Knowledge Learning of Language Models

ICLR 2022poster

Large Language Models (LMs) are known to encode world knowledge in their parameters as they pretrain on a vast amount of web corpus, which is often utilized for performing knowledge-dependent downstream tasks such as question answering, fact-checking, and open dialogue. In real-world scenarios, the…

Cited by 165SourcePDFScholar
2021

Cost-effective End-to-end Information Extraction for Semi-structured Document Images

EMNLP 2021main

A real-world information extraction (IE) system for semi-structured document images often involves a long pipeline of multiple modules, whose complexity dramatically increases its development and maintenance cost. One can instead consider an end-to-end model that directly maps the input to the targe…

2017

Are You Smarter Than a Sixth Grader? Textbook Question Answering for Multimodal Machine Comprehension

CVPR 2017spotlight

We introduce the task of Multi-Modal Machine Comprehension (M3C), which aims at answering multimodal questions given a context of text, diagrams and images. We present the Textbook Question Answering (TQA) dataset that includes 1,076 lessons and 26,260 multi-modal questions, taken from middle school…

Cited by 360PDFScholar
2017

Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension

ICLR 2017poster

Machine comprehension (MC), answering a query about a given context paragraph, requires modeling complex interactions between the context and the query. Recently, attention mechanisms have been successfully extended to MC. Typically these methods use attention to focus on a small portion of the cont…

Cited by 2454SourcecodeScholar