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Omar Shaikh

6 accepted papers

2025

Aligning Language Models with Demonstrated Feedback

ICLR 2025poster

Language models are aligned to emulate the collective voice of many, resulting in outputs that align with no one in particular. Steering LLMs away from generic output is possible through supervised finetuning or RLHF, but requires prohibitively large datasets for new ad-hoc tasks. We argue that it i…

2025

Navigating Rifts in Human-LLM Grounding: Study and Benchmark

ACL 2025long

Language models excel at following instructions but often struggle with the collaborative aspects of conversation that humans naturally employ. This limitation in grounding—the process by which conversation participants establish mutual understanding—can lead to outcomes ranging from frustrated user…

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

Grounding Gaps in Language Model Generations

NAACL 2024long

Effective conversation requires common ground: a shared understanding between the participants. Common ground, however, does not emerge spontaneously in conversation. Speakers and listeners work together to both identify and construct a shared basis while avoiding misunderstanding. To accomplish gro…

2023

Modeling Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Inference with Codenames Duet

ACL 2023findings

Pragmatic reference enables efficient interpersonal communication. Prior work uses simple reference games to test models of pragmatic reasoning, often with unidentified speakers and listeners. In practice, however, speakers’ sociocultural background shapes their pragmatic assumptions. For example, r…

2023

On Second Thought, Let’s Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoning

ACL 2023long

Generating a Chain of Thought (CoT) has been shown to consistently improve large language model (LLM) performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. However, prior work has mainly focused on logical reasoning tasks (e.g. arithmetic, commonsense QA); it remains unclear whether improvements hold for more d…