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Shay B Cohen

31 accepted papers

2026

Spectral Attention Steering for Prompt Highlighting

ICLR 2026poster

Steering a large language model's attention towards user-specified highlighted text is a critical capability. Existing prompt highlighting methods are incompatible with modern efficient attention mechanisms like Flash Attention due to their reliance on post-hoc matrix editing. We introduce Spectral…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

CoMAT: Chain of Mathematically Annotated Thought Improves Mathematical Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Mathematical reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), despite progress in prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We present **Chain of Mathematically Annotated Thought (CoMAT)**, which enhances reasoning through two stages: *Symbolic Conversion* (conv

2025

Eliciting In-context Retrieval and Reasoning for Long-context Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

Recent advancements in long-context language models (LCLMs) promise to transform Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by simplifying pipelines. With their expanded context windows, LCLMs can process entire knowledge bases and perform retrieval and reasoning directly – a capability we define as In-Co…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Iterative Multilingual Spectral Attribute Erasure

EMNLP 2025

Multilingual representations embed words with similar meanings to share a common semantic space across languages, creating opportunities to transfer debiasing effects between languages. However, existing methods for debiassing are unable to exploit this opportunity because they operate on individual

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

One More Question is Enough, Expert Question Decomposition (EQD) Model for Domain Quantitative Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Domain-specific quantitative reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), especially in fields requiring expert knowledge and complex question answering (QA). In this work, we propose Expert Question Decomposition (EQD), an approach designed to balance the use of domain know

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

PersonaLens: A Benchmark for Personalization Evaluation in Conversational AI Assistants

ACL 2025finding

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced conversational AI assistants. However, systematically evaluating how well these assistants apply personalization—adapting to individual user preferences while completing tasks—remains challenging. Existing personalization benchmarks focus on chit-chat, non-…

2025

PoisonBench: Assessing Language Model Vulnerability to Poisoned Preference Data

ICML 2025poster

Preference learning is a central component for aligning current LLMs, but this process can be vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. To address this concern, we introduce PoisonBench, a benchmark for evaluating large language models' susceptibility to data poisoning during preference learning. Data p…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Theorem Prover as a Judge for Synthetic Data Generation

ACL 2025long

The demand for synthetic data in mathematical reasoning has increased due to its potential to enhance the mathematical capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, ensuring the validity of intermediate reasoning steps remains a significant challenge, affecting data quality. While formal ve…

2025

What can Large Language Models Capture about Code Functional Equivalence?

NAACL 2025findings

Code-LLMs, LLMs pre-trained on large code corpora, have shown great progress in learning rich representations of the structure and syntax of code, successfully using it to generate or classify code fragments. At the same time, understanding if they are able to do so because they capture code semanti…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2024

Evaluating Automatic Metrics with Incremental Machine Translation Systems

EMNLP 2024finding

We introduce a dataset comprising commercial machine translations, gathered weekly over six years across 12 translation directions. Since human A/B testing is commonly used, we assume commercial systems improve over time, which enables us to evaluate machine translation (MT) metrics based on their p…

2024

Interpreting Context Look-ups in Transformers: Investigating Attention-MLP Interactions

EMNLP 2024main

Understanding the inner workings of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing their theoretical foundations and real-world applications. While the attention mechanism and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) have been studied independently, their interactions remain largely unexplored. This st…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Layer by Layer: Uncovering Where Multi-Task Learning Happens in Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models retain task-specific knowledge remains largely unexplored.…

2024

Spectral Editing of Activations for Large Language Model Alignment

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviours, such as generating untruthful or biased content. Editing their internal representations has been shown to be effective in mitigating such behaviours on top of the existing alignment methods. We propose a novel inference-time editing…

2024

einspace: Searching for Neural Architectures from Fundamental Operations

NeurIPS 2024poster

Neural architecture search (NAS) finds high performing networks for a given task. Yet the results of NAS are fairly prosaic; they did not e.g. create a shift from convolutional structures to transformers. This is not least because the search spaces in NAS often aren’t diverse enough to include such…

2023

A Joint Matrix Factorization Analysis of Multilingual Representations

EMNLP 2023long findings

We present an analysis tool based on joint matrix factorization for comparing latent representations of multilingual and monolingual models. An alternative to probing, this tool allows us to analyze multiple sets of representations in a joint manner. Using this tool, we study to what extent and how…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

AMR Parsing is Far from Solved: GrAPES, the Granular AMR Parsing Evaluation Suite

EMNLP 2023long main

We present the Granular AMR Parsing Evaluation Suite (GrAPES), a challenge set for Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing with accompanying evaluation metrics. AMR parsers now obtain high scores on the standard AMR evaluation metric Smatch, close to or even above reported inter-annotator agre…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

DISCOSQA: A Knowledge Base Question Answering System for Space Debris based on Program Induction

ACL 2023industry

Space program agencies execute complex satellite operations that need to be supported by the technical knowledge contained in their extensive information systems. Knowledge Base (KB) databases are an effective way of storing and accessing such information to scale. In this work we present a system,…

2023

Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Multilingual Summarisation

EMNLP 2023long main

Hallucinations pose a significant challenge to the reliability of neural models for abstractive summarisation. While automatically generated summaries may be fluent, they often lack faithfulness to the original document. This issue becomes even more pronounced in low-resource languages, where summar…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

PMIndiaSum: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Headline Summarization for Languages in India

EMNLP 2023long findings

This paper introduces PMIndiaSum, a multilingual and massively parallel summarization corpus focused on languages in India. Our corpus provides a training and testing ground for four language families, 14 languages, and the largest to date with 196 language pairs. We detail our construction workflow…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

The Larger they are, the Harder they Fail: Language Models do not Recognize Identifier Swaps in Python

ACL 2023findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have successfully been applied to code generation tasks, raising the question of how well these models understand programming. Typical programming languages have invariances and equivariances in their semantics that human programmers intuitively understand and exploit, s…

2022

Factorizing Content and Budget Decisions in Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents

EMNLP 2022main

We argue that disentangling content selection from the budget used to cover salient content improves the performance and applicability of abstractive summarizers. Our method, FactorSum, does this disentanglement by factorizing summarization into two steps through an energy function: (1) generation o…

2021

A Differentiable Relaxation of Graph Segmentation and Alignment for AMR Parsing

EMNLP 2021main

Abstract Meaning Representations (AMR) are a broad-coverage semantic formalism which represents sentence meaning as a directed acyclic graph. To train most AMR parsers, one needs to segment the graph into subgraphs and align each such subgraph to a word in a sentence; this is normally done at prepro…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2021

Open-Domain Contextual Link Prediction and its Complementarity with Entailment Graphs

EMNLP 2021finding

An open-domain knowledge graph (KG) has entities as nodes and natural language relations as edges, and is constructed by extracting (subject, relation, object) triples from text. The task of open-domain link prediction is to infer missing relations in the KG. Previous work has used standard link pre…

2020

Compositional languages emerge in a neural iterated learning model

ICLR 2020poster

The principle of compositionality, which enables natural language to represent complex concepts via a structured combination of simpler ones, allows us to convey an open-ended set of messages using a limited vocabulary. If compositionality is indeed a natural property of language, we may expect it t…

Cited by 115SourcecodeScholar