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Raphael Tang

17 accepted papers

2026

Unlocking Zero-Shot Geospatial Reasoning via Indirect Rewards

ICML 2026poster

Training robust reasoning vision-language models (VLMs) in rare domains (such as geospatial) is fundamentally constrained by supervision scarcity. While raw geospatial imagery is abundant, the amount of task-direct supervision falls far behind that of common domains. In this work, we validate an imp…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Lost in Embeddings: Information Loss in Vision–Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Vision–language models (VLMs) often process visual inputs through a pretrained vision encoder, followed by a projection into the language model’s embedding space via a connector component. While crucial for modality fusion, the potential information loss induced by this projection step and its direc

2025

Multilingual Language Model Pretraining using Machine-translated Data

EMNLP 2025

English, as a very high-resource language, enables the pretraining of high-quality large language models (LLMs). However, the same can not be said for most other languages, likely due to a gap in the quality and diversity of available multilingual pretraining corpora. In this work, we find that docu

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture

EMNLP 2024main

Food is a rich and varied dimension of cultural heritage, crucial to both individuals and social groups. To bridge the gap in the literature on the often-overlooked regional diversity in this domain, we introduce FoodieQA, a manually curated, fine-grained image-text dataset capturing the intricate f…

2024

Found in the Middle: Permutation Self-Consistency Improves Listwise Ranking in Large Language Models

NAACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit positional bias in how they use context, which especially affects listwise ranking. To address this, we propose permutation self-consistency, a form of self-consistency over the ranking list outputs of black-box LLMs. Our key idea is to marginalize out different…

2024

Strings from the Library of Babel: Random Sampling as a Strong Baseline for Prompt Optimisation

NAACL 2024long

Recent prompt optimisation approaches use the generative nature of language models to produce prompts – even rivaling the performance of human-curated prompts. In this paper, we demonstrate that randomly sampling tokens from the model vocabulary as “separators” can be as effective as language models…

2024

Understanding Retrieval Robustness for Retrieval-augmented Image Captioning

ACL 2024long

Recent advances in retrieval-augmented models for image captioning highlight the benefit of retrieving related captions for efficient, lightweight models with strong domain-transfer capabilities. While these models demonstrate the success of retrieval augmentation, retrieval models are still far fro…

2024

Words Worth a Thousand Pictures: Measuring and Understanding Perceptual Variability in Text-to-Image Generation

EMNLP 2024main

Diffusion models are the state of the art in text-to-image generation, but their perceptual variability remains understudied. In this paper, we examine how prompts affect image variability in black-box diffusion-based models. We propose W1KP, a human-calibrated measure of variability in a set of ima…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Operator Selection and Ordering in a Pipeline Approach to Efficiency Optimizations for Transformers

ACL 2023findings

There exists a wide variety of efficiency methods for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as pruning, distillation, dynamic inference, quantization, etc. From a different perspective, we can consider an efficiency method as an operator applied on a model. Naturally, we may construct a pipe…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

What the DAAM: Interpreting Stable Diffusion Using Cross Attention

ACL 2023long

Diffusion models are a milestone in text-to-image generation, but they remain poorly understood, lacking interpretability analyses. In this paper, we perform a text-image attribution analysis on Stable Diffusion, a recently open-sourced model. To produce attribution maps, we upscale and aggregate cr…

2023

“Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors

ACL 2023findings

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are often used for text classification due to their high accuracy. However, DNNs can be computationally intensive, requiring millions of parameters and large amounts of labeled data, which can make them expensive to use, to optimize, and to transfer to out-of-distribution…

2022

SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale

EMNLP 2022industry

End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems represent the state of the art, but they rely on thousands of hours of manually annotated speech for training, as well as heavyweight computation for inference. Of course, this impedes commercialization since most companies lack vast human and computat…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2022

Temporal Early Exiting for Streaming Speech Commands Recognition

ICASSP 2022accepted

Limited-vocabulary speech commands recognition is the task of classifying a short utterance as one of several speech commands, for which neural networks obtain state-of-the-art results. In particular, recurrent neural networks represent a common approach for streaming commands recognition systems. I…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

The Art of Abstention: Selective Prediction and Error Regularization for Natural Language Processing

ACL 2021long

In selective prediction, a classifier is allowed to abstain from making predictions on low-confidence examples. Though this setting is interesting and important, selective prediction has rarely been examined in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. To fill this void in the literature, we study in…

2018

An Experimental Analysis of the Power Consumption of Convolutional Neural Networks for Keyword Spotting

ICASSP 2018accepted

Nearly all previous work on small-footprint keyword spotting with neural networks quantify model footprint in terms of the number of parameters and multiply operations for a feedforward inference pass. These values are, however, proxy measures since empirical performance in actual deployments is det…

Cited by 0SourceScholar