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Sewon Min

36 accepted papers

2026

Constantly Improving Image Models Need Constantly Improving Benchmarks

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances in image generation, often driven by proprietary systems like GPT-4o Image Gen, regularly introduce new capabilities that reshape how users interact with these models. Existing benchmarks often lag behind and fail to capture these emerging use cases, leaving a gap between community p…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

DS SERVE: A Framework for Efficient and Scalable Neural Retrieval

AAAI 2026technical

We present DS SERVE, a framework that transforms large-scale text datasets—comprising half a trillion tokens—into a high-performance neural retrieval system. DS SERVE offers both a web interface and API endpoints, achieving low latency with modest memory overhead on a single node. The framework also

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

FrontierCS: Evolving Challenges for Evolving Intelligence

ICML 2026poster

We introduce FrontierCS, a benchmark of 240 open-ended problems across diverse areas of computer science, designed and reviewed by experts, including CS PhDs and top-tier competitive programming participants and problem setters. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on tasks with known optimal solut…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Frustratingly Simple Retrieval Improves Challenging, Reasoning-Intensive Benchmarks

ICLR 2026poster

Retrieval augmentation has primarily been studied in limited settings, such as factoid question answering; more challenging, reasoning-intensive benchmarks have seen limited success from minimal RAG. In this work, we challenge this prevailing view on a set of established, reasoning-intensive benchma…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reinforcement Learning from Dynamic Critic Feedback for Free-Form Generations

ICLR 2026poster

Open-ended generation tasks require outputs to satisfy diverse and often implicit task-specific evaluation rubrics. The sheer number of relevant rubrics leads to prohibitively high verification costs and incomplete assessments of a response, making reinforcement learning (RL) post-training with rubr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Rubrics for Deep Research

ICML 2026oral

Deep research agents perform multi-step research to produce long-form, well-attributed answers. However, most open deep research agents are trained on easily verifiable short-form QA tasks via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, which does not extend to realistic long-form tasks. We addr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reliable Fine-Grained Evaluation of Natural Language Math Proofs

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) for mathematical reasoning have largely focused on tasks with easily verifiable final answers while generating and verifying natural language math proofs remains an open challenge. We identify the absence of a reliable, fine-grained evaluator for LLM-g…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Residual Context Diffusion Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a ``remasking" mechanism that decodes only the most confident tokens and di…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Spurious Rewards: Rethinking Training Signals in RLVR

ICML 2026poster

We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong mathematical reasoning in certain language models even with spurious rewards that have little, no, or outright negative correlation with the correct answer. For example, RLVR training with GRPO improves MATH-500 per…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

What's In My Human Feedback? Learning Interpretable Descriptions of Preference Data

ICLR 2026oral

Preference data is widely used for aligning language models, but remains largely opaque. While prior work has studied specific aspects of annotator preference (e.g., length or sycophancy), automatically inferring preferences without pre-specifying hypotheses remains challenging. We introduce *What's…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

FlexOLMo: Open Language Models for Flexible Data Use

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

We introduce FlexOLMo, a new class of language models (LMs) that supports (1) distributed training without data sharing, where different model parameters are independently trained on private datasets, and (2) data-flexible inference, where these parameters along with their associated data can be eas…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

OLMoE: Open Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

ICLR 2025oral

We introduce OLMoE, a fully open, state-of-the-art language model leveraging sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE). OLMoE-1B-7B has 7 billion (B) parameters but uses only 1B per input token. We pretrain it on 5 trillion tokens and further adapt it to create OLMoE-1B-7B-Instruct. Our models outperform all…

2025

Organize the Web: Constructing Domains Enhances Pre-Training Data Curation

ICML 2025poster

Modern language models are trained on large, unstructured datasets consisting of trillions of tokens and obtained by crawling the web. The unstructured nature makes it difficult to reason about their contents and develop systematic approaches to data curation. In this paper, we unpack monolithic web…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

BTR: Binary Token Representations for Efficient Retrieval Augmented Language Models

ICLR 2024spotlight

Retrieval augmentation addresses many critical problems in large language models such as hallucination, staleness, and privacy leaks. However, running retrieval-augmented language models (LMs) is slow and difficult to scale due to processing large amounts of retrieved text. We introduce binary toke…

2024

CopyBench: Measuring Literal and Non-Literal Reproduction of Copyright-Protected Text in Language Model Generation

EMNLP 2024main

Evaluating the degree of reproduction of copyright-protected content by language models (LMs) is of significant interest to the AI and legal communities. Although both literal and non-literal similarities are considered by courts when assessing the degree of reproduction, prior research has focused…

2024

In-Context Pretraining: Language Modeling Beyond Document Boundaries

ICLR 2024spotlight

Language models are currently trained to predict tokens given document prefixes, enabling them to zero shot long form generation and prompting-style tasks which can be reduced to document completion. We instead present IN-CONTEXT PRETRAINING, a new approach where language models are trained on a seq…

2024

REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models

NAACL 2024long

We introduce REPLUG, a retrieval-augmented language modeling framework that treats the language model (LM) as a black box and augments it with a tuneable retrieval model. Unlike prior retrieval-augmented LMs that train language models with special cross-attention mechanisms to encode the retrieved t…

2024

SILO Language Models: Isolating Legal Risk In a Nonparametric Datastore

ICLR 2024spotlight

The legality of training language models (LMs) on copyrighted or otherwise restricted data is under intense debate. However, as we show, model performance significantly degrades if trained only on low-risk text (e.g., out-of-copyright books or government documents), due to its limited size and domai…

2024

Scaling Retrieval-Based Language Models with a Trillion-Token Datastore

NeurIPS 2024poster

Scaling laws with respect to the amount of training data and the number of parameters allow us to predict the cost-benefit trade-offs of pretraining language models (LMs) in different configurations. In this paper, we consider another dimension of scaling: the amount of data available at inference t…

2023

CREPE: Open-Domain Question Answering with False Presuppositions

ACL 2023long

When asking about unfamiliar topics, information seeking users often pose questions with false presuppositions. Most existing question answering (QA) datasets, in contrast, assume all questions have well defined answers. We introduce CREPE, a QA dataset containing a natural distribution of presuppos…

2023

FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation

EMNLP 2023long main

Evaluating the factuality of long-form text generated by large language models (LMs) is non-trivial because (1) generations often contain a mixture of supported and unsupported pieces of information, making binary judgments of quality inadequate, and (2) human evaluation is time-consuming and costly…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models

EMNLP 2023long findings

We investigate the ability of language models to perform compositional reasoning tasks where the overall solution depends on correctly composing the answers to sub-problems. We measure how often models can correctly answer all sub-problems but not generate the overall solution, a ratio we call the…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Nonparametric Masked Language Modeling

ACL 2023findings

Existing language models (LMs) predict tokens with a softmax over a finite vocabulary, which can make it difficult to predict rare tokens or phrases. We introduce NPM, the first nonparametric masked language model that replaces this softmax with a nonparametric distribution over every phrase in a re…

2023

Towards Understanding Chain-of-Thought Prompting: An Empirical Study of What Matters

ACL 2023long

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). CoT explicitly encourages the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem, by providing a series of reasoning steps in the demonstrations. Despite its succe…

2023

Z-ICL: Zero-Shot In-Context Learning with Pseudo-Demonstrations

ACL 2023long

Although large language models can be prompted for both zero- and few-shot learning, performance drops significantly when no demonstrations are available. In this paper, we introduce Z-ICL, a new zero-shot method that closes the gap by constructing pseudo-demonstrations for a given test input using…

2022

Exploring The Landscape of Distributional Robustness for Question Answering Models

EMNLP 2022finding

We conduct a large empirical evaluation to investigate the landscape of distributional robustness in question answering. Our investigation spans over 350 models and 16 question answering datasets, including a diverse set of architectures, model sizes, and adaptation methods (e.g., fine-tuning, adapt…

2022

FaVIQ: FAct Verification from Information-seeking Questions

ACL 2022long

Despite significant interest in developing general purpose fact checking models, it is challenging to construct a large-scale fact verification dataset with realistic real-world claims. Existing claims are either authored by crowdworkers, thereby introducing subtle biases thatare difficult to contro…

2022

Noisy Channel Language Model Prompting for Few-Shot Text Classification

ACL 2022long

We introduce a noisy channel approach for language model prompting in few-shot text classification. Instead of computing the likelihood of the label given the input (referred as direct models), channel models compute the conditional probability of the input given the label, and are thereby required…

2022

Prompt Waywardness: The Curious Case of Discretized Interpretation of Continuous Prompts

NAACL 2022long

Fine-tuning continuous prompts for target tasks has recently emerged as a compact alternative to full model fine-tuning. Motivated by these promising results, we investigate the feasibility of extracting a discrete (textual) interpretation of continuous prompts that is faithful to the problem they s…

2022

Re-Examining Calibration: The Case of Question Answering

EMNLP 2022finding

For users to trust model predictions, they need to understand model outputs, particularly their confidence — calibration aims to adjust (calibrate) models’ confidence to match expected accuracy. We argue that the traditional calibration evaluation does not promote effective calibrations: for example…

2022

Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?

EMNLP 2022main

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn—perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little understanding of how the model learns and which aspects of the demonstrati…

2021

Joint Passage Ranking for Diverse Multi-Answer Retrieval

EMNLP 2021main

We study multi-answer retrieval, an under-explored problem that requires retrieving passages to cover multiple distinct answers for a given question. This task requires joint modeling of retrieved passages, as models should not repeatedly retrieve passages containing the same answer at the cost of m…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2021

RECONSIDER: Improved Re-Ranking using Span-Focused Cross-Attention for Open Domain Question Answering

NAACL 2021long

State-of-the-art Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models for Open-domain Question Answering (QA) are typically trained for span selection using distantly supervised positive examples and heuristically retrieved negative examples. This training scheme possibly explains empirical observations that…