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Pasquale Minervini

39 accepted papers

2026

Fast and Expressive Multi-Byte Prediction with Probabilistic Circuits

ICML 2026poster

Multi-token prediction (MTP) is a prominent strategy to significantly speed up generation in large language models (LLMs), especially in byte-level LLMs, which are tokeniser-free but prohibitively slow. However, existing MTP methods often sacrifice expressiveness by assuming independence between fut…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning GUI Grounding with Spatial Reasoning from Visual Feedback

ICML 2026poster

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding is commonly framed as a coordinate prediction task – given a natural language instruction, generate on-screen coordinates for actions such as clicks and keystrokes. However, recent Vision Language Models (VLMs) often fail to predict accurate numeric coordinat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Universal Properties of Activation Sparsity in Modern Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Activation sparsity is an intriguing property of deep neural networks that has been extensively studied in ReLU-based models, due to its advantages for efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. However, methods relying on exact zero activations do not directly apply to modern Large Language Mod…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

VLM-RobustBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Robustness of Vision-Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on standard, high-quality datasets, but we still don't fully understand how they perform under real-world image distortions. We present **VLM-RobustBench**, a benchmark spanning 49 augmentation types across noise, blur, weather, digital, and g…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2025

Adaptive Computation Modules: Granular Conditional Computation for Efficient Inference

AAAI 2025technical

While transformer models have been highly successful, they are computationally inefficient. We observe that for each layer, the full width of the layer may be needed only for a small subset of tokens inside a batch and that the "effective" width needed to process a token can vary from layer to layer…

2025

An Auditing Test to Detect Behavioral Shift in Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

As language models (LMs) approach human-level performance, a comprehensive understanding of their behavior becomes crucial. This includes evaluating capabilities, biases, task performance, and alignment with societal values. Extensive initial evaluations, including red teaming and diverse benchmark…

2025

Are We Done with MMLU?

NAACL 2025long

Maybe not. We identify and analyse errors in the popular Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Even though MMLU is widely adopted, our analysis demonstrates numerous ground truth errors that obscure the true capabilities of LLMs. For example, we find that 57% of the analysed que…

2025

DeCoRe: Decoding by Contrasting Retrieval Heads to Mitigate Hallucinations

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) often hallucinate, producing unfaithful or factually incorrect outputs by misrepresenting the provided context or incorrectly recalling internal knowledge. Recent studies have identified specific attention heads within the Transformer architecture, known as retrieval hea

2025

FLARE: Faithful Logic-Aided Reasoning and Exploration

EMNLP 2025

Modern Question Answering (QA) and Reasoning approaches with Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting but struggle with generating outputs faithful to their intermediate reasoning chains. While neuro-symbolic methods like Faithful CoT (F-CoT) offer higher faithfulne

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

GRADA: Graph-based Reranking against Adversarial Documents Attack

EMNLP 2025

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks can improve the factual accuracy of large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge from retrieved documents, thereby overcoming the limitations of models’ static intrinsic knowledge. However, these systems are susceptible to adversarial

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Is Complex Query Answering Really Complex?

ICML 2025spotlight

Complex query answering (CQA) on knowledge graphs (KGs) is gaining momentum as a challenging reasoning task. In this paper, we show that the current benchmarks for CQA might not be as *complex* as we think, as the way they are built distorts our perception of progress in this field. For example, we…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

MMLongBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Vision-Language Models Effectively and Thoroughly

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

The rapid extension of context windows in large vision-language models has given rise to long-context vision-language models (LCVLMs), which are capable of handling hundreds of images with interleaved text tokens in a single forward pass. In this work, we introduce MMLongBench, the first benchmark c…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Mixtures of In-Context Learners

ACL 2025long

In-context learning (ICL) adapts LLMs by providing demonstrations without fine-tuning the model parameters; however, it is very sensitive to the choice of in-context demonstrations, and processing many demonstrations can be computationally demanding. We propose Mixtures of In-Context Learners (MoICL…

2025

Self-Training Large Language Models for Tool-Use Without Demonstrations

NAACL 2025findings

Large language models (LLMs) remain prone to factual inaccuracies and computational errors, including hallucinations and mistakes in mathematical reasoning. Recent work augmented LLMs with tools to mitigate these shortcomings, but often requires curated gold tool-use demonstrations. In this paper, w…

2025

Steering Knowledge Selection Behaviours in LLMs via SAE-Based Representation Engineering

NAACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) can store a significant amount of factual knowledge in their parameters. However, their parametric knowledge may conflict with the information provided in the context—this phenomenon, known as context-memory knowledge conflicts, can lead to undesirable model behaviour, s…

2025

SynDARin: Synthesising Datasets for Automated Reasoning in Low-Resource Languages

COLING 2025main

Question Answering (QA) datasets have been instrumental in developing and evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities. However, such datasets are scarce for languages other than English due to the cost and difficulties of collection and manual annotation. This means that producing novel model…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

TUBA: Cross-Lingual Transferability of Backdoor Attacks in LLMs with Instruction Tuning

ACL 2025finding

The implications of backdoor attacks on English-centric large language models (LLMs) have been widely examined — such attacks can be achieved by embedding malicious behaviors during training and activated under specific conditions that trigger malicious outputs. Despite the increasing support for mu…

2025

When Can Proxies Improve the Sample Complexity of Preference Learning?

ICML 2025poster

We address the problem of reward hacking, where maximising a proxy reward does not necessarily increase the true reward. This is a key concern for Large Language Models (LLMs), as they are often fine-tuned on human preferences that may not accurately reflect a true objective. Existing work uses vari…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

A Simple and Effective L_2 Norm-Based Strategy for KV Cache Compression

EMNLP 2024main

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is often hindered by the extensive memory requirements of the Key-Value (KV) cache, especially as context lengths increase. Existing approaches to reduce the KV cache size involve either fine-tuning the model to learn a compression strategy or leveragin…

2024

Analysing The Impact of Sequence Composition on Language Model Pre-Training

ACL 2024long

Most language model pre-training frameworks concatenate multiple documents into fixed-length sequences and use causal masking to compute the likelihood of each token given its context; this strategy is widely adopted due to its simplicity and efficiency. However, to this day, the influence of the pr…

2024

Atomic Inference for NLI with Generated Facts as Atoms

EMNLP 2024main

With recent advances, neural models can achieve human-level performance on various natural language tasks. However, there are no guarantees that any explanations from these models are faithful, i.e. that they reflect the inner workings of the model. Atomic inference overcomes this issue, providing i…

2024

On the Independence Assumption in Neurosymbolic Learning

ICML 2024poster

State-of-the-art neurosymbolic learning systems use probabilistic reasoning to guide neural networks towards predictions that conform to logical constraints. Many such systems assume that the probabilities of the considered symbols are conditionally independent given the input to simplify learning a…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

Probing the Emergence of Cross-lingual Alignment during LLM Training

ACL 2024findings

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable levels of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance. We speculate that this is predicated on their ability to align languages without explicit supervision from parallel sentences. While representations of translationally equivalent sent…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2024

SparseFit: Few-shot Prompting with Sparse Fine-tuning for Jointly Generating Predictions and Natural Language Explanations

ACL 2024long

Models that generate natural language explanations (NLEs) for their predictions have recently gained increasing interest. However, this approach usually demands large datasets of human-written NLEs for the ground-truth answers at training time, which can be expensive and potentially infeasible for s…

2024

Unveiling and Consulting Core Experts in Retrieval-Augmented MoE-based LLMs

EMNLP 2024main

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly improved the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. While existing research seeks to enhance RAG performance by retrieving higher-quality documents or designing RAG-specific LLMs, the internal mechanisms within L…

2024

Using Natural Language Explanations to Improve Robustness of In-context Learning

ACL 2024long

Recent studies demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can excel in many tasks via in-context learning (ICL). However, recentworks show that ICL-prompted models tend to produce inaccurate results when presented with adversarial inputs. In this work, we investigate whether augmenting ICL with…

2023

Adapting Neural Link Predictors for Data-Efficient Complex Query Answering

NeurIPS 2023poster

Answering complex queries on incomplete knowledge graphs is a challenging task where a model needs to answer complex logical queries in the presence of missing knowledge. Prior work in the literature has proposed to address this problem by designing architectures trained end-to-end for the complex q…

2023

Adaptive Perturbation-Based Gradient Estimation for Discrete Latent Variable Models

AAAI 2023technical

The integration of discrete algorithmic components in deep learning architectures has numerous applications. Recently, Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation, a class of gradient estimators for discrete exponential family distributions, was proposed by combining implicit differentiation through pert…

2023

No Train No Gain: Revisiting Efficient Training Algorithms For Transformer-based Language Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

The computation necessary for training Transformer-based language models has skyrocketed in recent years. This trend has motivated research on efficient training algorithms designed to improve training, validation, and downstream performance faster than standard training. In this work, we revisit th…

2022

An Efficient Memory-Augmented Transformer for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks

EMNLP 2022main

Access to external knowledge is essential for many natural language processing tasks, such as question answering and dialogue. Existing methods often rely on a parametric model that stores knowledge in its parameters, or use a retrieval-augmented model that has access to an external knowledge source…

2022

Complex Query Answering with Neural Link Predictors (Extended Abstract)*

IJCAI 2022poster

Neural link predictors are useful for identifying missing edges in large scale Knowledge Graphs. However, it is still not clear how to use these models for answering more complex queries containing logical conjunctions (∧), disjunctions (∨), and existential quantifiers (∃). We propose a framework fo…

2022

Logical Reasoning with Span-Level Predictions for Interpretable and Robust NLI Models

EMNLP 2022main

Current Natural Language Inference (NLI) models achieve impressive results, sometimes outperforming humans when evaluating on in-distribution test sets. However, as these models are known to learn from annotation artefacts and dataset biases, it is unclear to what extent the models are learning the…

2022

MedDistant19: Towards an Accurate Benchmark for Broad-Coverage Biomedical Relation Extraction

COLING 2022main

Relation extraction in the biomedical domain is challenging due to the lack of labeled data and high annotation costs, needing domain experts. Distant supervision is commonly used to tackle the scarcity of annotated data by automatically pairing knowledge graph relationships with raw texts. Such a p…

2022

ReFactor GNNs: Revisiting Factorisation-based Models from a Message-Passing Perspective

NeurIPS 2022accept

Factorisation-based Models (FMs), such as DistMult, have enjoyed enduring success for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) tasks, often outperforming Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, unlike GNNs, FMs struggle to incorporate node features and generalise to unseen nodes in inductive settings. Our wo…

2021

Complex Query Answering with Neural Link Predictors

ICLR 2021oral

Neural link predictors are immensely useful for identifying missing edges in large scale Knowledge Graphs. However, it is still not clear how to use these models for answering more complex queries that arise in a number of domains, such as queries using logical conjunctions ($\land$), disjunctions (…

2021

Implicit MLE: Backpropagating Through Discrete Exponential Family Distributions

NeurIPS 2021poster

Combining discrete probability distributions and combinatorial optimization problems with neural network components has numerous applications but poses several challenges. We propose Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (I-MLE), a framework for end-to-end learning of models combining discrete expo…

2021

Training Adaptive Computation for Open-Domain Question Answering with Computational Constraints

ACL 2021short

Adaptive Computation (AC) has been shown to be effective in improving the efficiency of Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems. However, the current AC approaches require tuning of all model parameters, and training state-of-the-art ODQA models requires significant computational resources tha…

2020

Learning Reasoning Strategies in End-to-End Differentiable Proving

ICML 2020poster

Attempts to render deep learning models interpretable, data-efficient, and robust have seen some success through hybridisation with rule-based systems, for example, in Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs). These neuro-symbolic models can induce interpretable rules and learn representations from data via ba…