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Patrick Fernandes

12 accepted papers

2025

Better Instruction-Following Through Minimum Bayes Risk

ICLR 2025spotlight

General-purpose LLM judges capable of human-level evaluation provide not only a scalable and accurate way of evaluating instruction-following LLMs but also new avenues for supervising and improving their performance. One promising way of leveraging LLM judges for supervision is through Minimum Bayes…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2025

Not-Just-Scaling Laws: Towards a Better Understanding of the Downstream Impact of Language Model Design Decisions

EMNLP 2025

Improvements in language model capabilities are often attributed to increasing model size or training data, but in some cases smaller models trained on curated data or with different architectural decisions can outperform larger ones trained on more tokens. What accounts for this? To quantify the im

2024

Modeling User Preferences with Automatic Metrics: Creating a High-Quality Preference Dataset for Machine Translation

EMNLP 2024main

Alignment with human preferences is an important step in developing accurate and safe large language models. This is no exception in machine translation (MT), where better handling of language nuances and context-specific variations leads to improved quality. However, preference data based on human…

2023

Epsilon Sampling Rocks: Investigating Sampling Strategies for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Machine Translation

EMNLP 2023long findings

Recent advances in machine translation (MT) have shown that Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding can be a powerful alternative to beam search decoding, especially when combined with neural-based utility functions. However, the performance of MBR decoding depends heavily on how and how many candidates a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Text Summarization with In-Context Learning

ACL 2023findings

Evaluation of natural language generation (NLG) is complex and multi-dimensional. Generated text can be evaluated for fluency, coherence, factuality, or any other dimensions of interest. Most frameworks that perform such multi-dimensional evaluation require training on large manually or syntheticall…

2023

Scaling Laws for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

ICML 2023poster

In this work, we provide a large-scale empirical study of the scaling properties of multilingual neural machine translation models. We examine how increases in the model size affect the model performance and investigate the role of the individual language pair weights on the scaling behavior. We fin…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2023

When Does Translation Require Context? A Data-driven, Multilingual Exploration

ACL 2023long

Although proper handling of discourse significantly contributes to the quality of machine translation (MT), these improvements are not adequately measured in common translation quality metrics. Recent works in context-aware MT attempt to target a small set of discourse phenomena during evaluation, h…

2022

Learning to Scaffold: Optimizing Model Explanations for Teaching

NeurIPS 2022accept

Modern machine learning models are opaque, and as a result there is a burgeoning academic subfield on methods that explain these models' behavior. However, what is the precise goal of providing such explanations, and how can we demonstrate that explanations achieve this goal? Some research argues t…

2022

Quality-Aware Decoding for Neural Machine Translation

NAACL 2022long

Despite the progress in machine translation quality estimation and evaluation in the last years, decoding in neural machine translation (NMT) is mostly oblivious to this and centers around finding the most probable translation according to the model (MAP decoding), approximated with beam search. In…

2021

Do Context-Aware Translation Models Pay the Right Attention?

ACL 2021long

Context-aware machine translation models are designed to leverage contextual information, but often fail to do so. As a result, they inaccurately disambiguate pronouns and polysemous words that require context for resolution. In this paper, we ask several questions: What contexts do human translator…

2021

Measuring and Increasing Context Usage in Context-Aware Machine Translation

ACL 2021long

Recent work in neural machine translation has demonstrated both the necessity and feasibility of using inter-sentential context, context from sentences other than those currently being translated. However, while many current methods present model architectures that theoretically can use this extra c…