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Niloofar Yousefi

5 accepted papers

2026

FlowNIB: An Information Bottleneck Analysis of Bidirectional vs. Unidirectional Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Bidirectional language models (LMs) consistently show stronger context understanding than unidirectional models, yet the theoretical reason remains unclear. We present a simple information bottleneck (IB) perspective: bidirectional representations preserve more mutual information (MI) about both the…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

BnTTS: Few-Shot Speaker Adaptation in Low-Resource Setting

NAACL 2025findings

This paper introduces BnTTS (Bangla Text-To-Speech), the first framework for Bangla speaker adaptation-based TTS, designed to bridge the gap in Bangla speech synthesis using minimal training data. Building upon the XTTS architecture, our approach integrates Bangla into a multilingual TTS pipeline, w…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Does Self-Attention Need Separate Weights in Transformers?

NAACL 2025industry

Self-attention has revolutionized natural language processing by capturing long-range dependencies and improving context understanding. However, it comes with high computational costs and struggles with sequential data’s inherent directionality. This paper investigates and presents a simplified appr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Predicting Through Generation: Why Generation Is Better for Prediction

ACL 2025long

This paper argues that generating output tokens is more effective than using pooled representations for prediction tasks because token-level generation retains more mutual information. Since LLMs are trained on massive text corpora using next-token prediction, generation aligns naturally with their…

2025

RoCoFT: Efficient Finetuning of Large Language Models with Row-Column Updates

ACL 2025long

We propose Row-Column Fine-Tuning(RoCoFT), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for large language models based on updating only a few rows and columns of the weight matrices in transformers. Through extensive experiments with medium-sized LMs like RoBERTa and DeBERTa, and larger LMs like Bloom-…