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Soujanya Poria

63 accepted papers

2026

10 Open Challenges Steering the Future of Vision-Language-Action Models

AAAI 2026technical

Due to their ability of follow natural language instructions, vision-language-action (VLA) models are increasingly preva- lent in the embodied AI arena, following the widespread suc- cess of their precursors—LLMs and VLMs. In this paper, we discuss 10 principal milestones in the ongoing develop- men

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2026

Chain-of-Glimpse: Search-Guided Progressive Object-Grounded Reasoning for Video Understanding

ICML 2026poster

Video understanding requires identifying and reasoning over semantically discriminative visual objects across frames, yet existing object-agnostic solutions struggle to effectively handle substantial object variations over time. To address this, we introduce Chain-of-Glimpse, a search-guided progres…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Data Agent: Learning to Select Data via End-to-End Dynamic Optimization

ICML 2026poster

Dynamic Data selection aims to accelerate training by prioritizing informative samples during online training. However, existing methods typically rely on task-specific handcrafted metrics or static/snapshot-based criteria to estimate sample importance, limiting scalability across learning paradigms…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Demystifying Deep Search: A Holistic Evaluation with Hint-free Multi-Hop Questions and Factorised Metrics

ICLR 2026poster

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and web agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-hop deep search tasks, yet current practice suffers from two major limitations. First, most benchmarks leak the reasoning path in the question text, allowing models to follow surface cues rather than disc…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

DialogXpert: Driving Intelligent and Emotion-Aware Conversations Through Online Value-Based Reinforcement Learning with LLM Priors

AAAI 2026technical

Large-language-model (LLM) agents excel at reactive dialogue but struggle with proactive, goal-driven interactions due to myopic decoding and costly planning. We introduce DialogXpert, which leverages a frozen LLM to propose a small, high-quality set of candidate actions per turn and employs a compa

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Measuring and Mitigating Rapport Bias of Large Language Models under Multi-Agent Social Interactions

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems (MAS) as components of collaborative intelligence, where peer interactions dynamically shape individual decision-making. While prior work has largely focused on conformity bias, we broaden the scope to examine how LLMs bui…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

OffTopicEval: When Large Language Models Enter the Wrong Chat, Almost Always!

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Model (LLM) safety is one of the most pressing challenges for enabling wide-scale deployment. While most studies and global discussions focus on generic harms, such as models assisting users in harming themselves or others, enterprises face a more fundamental concern: whether LLM-base…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

TangoFlux: Super Fast and Faithful Text to Audio Generation with Flow Matching and Clap-Ranked Preference Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce TangoFlux, an efficient Text-to-Audio (TTA) generative model with 515M parameters, capable of generating up to 30 seconds of 44.1kHz audio in 3.7 seconds on a A40 GPU. A key challenge in aligning TTA models lies in creating preference pairs, as TTA lacks structured mechanisms like verif…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AlgoPuzzleVQA: Diagnosing Multimodal Reasoning Challenges of Language Models with Algorithmic Multimodal Puzzles

NAACL 2025long

This paper introduces the novel task of multimodal puzzle solving, framed within the context of visual question-answering. We present a new dataset, AlgoPuzzleVQA designed to challenge and evaluate the capabilities of multimodal language models in solving algorithmic puzzles that necessitate both vi…

2025

DiffPO: Diffusion-styled Preference Optimization for Inference Time Alignment of Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Inference-time alignment provides an efficient alternative for aligning LLMs with humans. However, these approaches still face challenges, such as limited scalability due to policy-specific value functions and latency during the inference phase. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Diffusion-…

2025

Emma-X: An Embodied Multimodal Action Model with Grounded Chain of Thought and Look-ahead Spatial Reasoning

ACL 2025long

Traditional reinforcement learning-based robotic control methods are often task-specific and fail to generalize across diverse environments or unseen objects and instructions. Visual Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong scene understanding and planning capabilities but lack the ability to gener…

2025

Error Typing for Smarter Rewards: Improving Process Reward Models with Error-Aware Hierarchical Supervision

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, especially during multi‐hop and reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematical problem solving. While Outcome Reward Models verify only final answers, Process Reward Models (PRMs) score each intermediate step to steer generation toward coheren

2025

Evaluating LLMs’ Mathematical and Coding Competency through Ontology-guided Interventions

ACL 2025finding

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased striking results on existing logical reasoning benchmarks, with some models even surpassing human performance. However, the true depth of their competencies and robustness in reasoning tasks remains an open question. To this end, in…

2025

Ferret: Faster and Effective Automated Red Teaming with Reward-Based Scoring Technique

EMNLP 2025

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into real-world applications, ensuring their safety and robustness is critical. Automated red-teaming methods generate adversarial attacks to identify vulnerabilities, but existing approaches often face challenges like slow performance, lim

2025

From Grounding to Manipulation: Case Studies of Foundation Model Integration in Embodied Robotic Systems

EMNLP 2025

Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly applied to bridge language and action in embodied agents, yet the operational characteristics of different integration strategies remain under-explored—especially for complex instruction following and versatile action generation in changing environments. We i

2025

Libra-Leaderboard: Towards Responsible AI through a Balanced Leaderboard of Safety and Capability

NAACL 2025system demonstrations

As large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, leaderboards play a significant role in steering their development. Existing leaderboards often prioritize model capabilities while overlooking safety concerns, leaving a significant gap in responsible AI development. To address this gap, we introd…

2025

M-LongDoc: A Benchmark For Multimodal Super-Long Document Understanding And A Retrieval-Aware Tuning Framework

EMNLP 2025

The ability to understand and answer questions over documents can be useful in many business and practical applications. However, documents often contain lengthy and diverse multimodal contents such as texts, figures, and tables, which are very time-consuming for humans to read thoroughly. Hence, th

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MOOSE-Chem: Large Language Models for Rediscovering Unseen Chemistry Scientific Hypotheses

ICLR 2025poster

Scientific discovery contributes largely to the prosperity of human society, and recent progress shows that LLMs could potentially catalyst the process. However, it is still unclear whether LLMs can discover novel and valid hypotheses in chemistry. In this work, we investigate this main research que…

2025

Measuring and Enhancing Trustworthiness of LLMs in RAG through Grounded Attributions and Learning to Refuse

ICLR 2025oral

LLMs are an integral component of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. While many studies focus on evaluating the overall quality of end-to-end RAG systems, there is a gap in understanding the appropriateness of LLMs for the RAG task. To address this, we introduce Trust-Score, a holistic me…

2025

Pixel-Level Reasoning Segmentation via Multi-turn Conversations

ACL 2025long

Existing visual perception systems focus on region-level segmentation in single-turn dialogues, relying on complex and explicit query instructions. Such systems cannot reason at the pixel level and comprehend dynamic user intent that changes over interaction. Our work tackles this issue by introduci…

2025

Reward-Guided Tree Search for Inference Time Alignment of Large Language Models

NAACL 2025long

Inference-time computation methods enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging additional computational resources to achieve superior results. Common techniques, such as Best-of-N sampling, Majority Voting, and variants of tree-search algorithm have proven to be effective i…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Why AI Is WEIRD and Shouldn't Be This Way: Towards AI for Everyone, with Everyone, by Everyone

AAAI 2025technical

This paper presents a vision for creating AI systems that are inclusive at every stage of development, from data collection to model design and evaluation. We address key limitations in the current AI pipeline and its WEIRD* representation, such as lack of data diversity, biases in model performance…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

CM-TTS: Enhancing Real Time Text-to-Speech Synthesis Efficiency through Weighted Samplers and Consistency Models

NAACL 2024findings

Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems find broad applications in voice assistants, e-learning, and audiobook creation. The pursuit of modern models, like Diffusion Models (DMs), holds promise for achieving high-fidelity, real-time speech synthesis. Yet, the efficiency of multi-step sampling in Diffusi…

2024

Chain-of-Knowledge: Grounding Large Language Models via Dynamic Knowledge Adapting over Heterogeneous Sources

ICLR 2024poster

We present chain-of-knowledge (CoK), a novel framework that augments large language models (LLMs) by dynamically incorporating grounding information from heterogeneous sources. It results in more factual rationales and reduced hallucination in generation. Specifically, CoK consists of three stages:…

2024

HYPERTTS: Parameter Efficient Adaptation in Text to Speech Using Hypernetworks

COLING 2024main

Neural speech synthesis, or text-to-speech (TTS), aims to transform a signal from the text domain to the speech domain. While developing TTS architectures that train and test on the same set of speakers has seen significant improvements, out-of-domain speaker performance still faces enormous limitat…

2024

Language Models are Homer Simpson! Safety Re-Alignment of Fine-tuned Language Models through Task Arithmetic

ACL 2024long

We propose RESTA to perform LLM realignment towards safety, which gets compromised due to downstream task fine-tuning. RESTA stands for REstoring Safety through Task Arithmetic. At its core, it involves a simple arithmetic addition of a safety vector to the weights of the compromised model. We demon…

2024

Large Language Models for Automated Open-domain Scientific Hypotheses Discovery

ACL 2024findings

Hypothetical induction is recognized as the main reasoning type when scientists make observations about the world and try to propose hypotheses to explain those observations. Past research on hypothetical induction is under a constrained setting: (1) the observation annotations in the dataset are ca…

2024

Mustango: Toward Controllable Text-to-Music Generation

NAACL 2024long

The quality of the text-to-music models has reached new heights due to recent advancements in diffusion models. The controllability of various musical aspects, however, has barely been explored. In this paper, we propose Mustango: a music-domain-knowledge-inspired text-to-music system based on diffu…

2024

PuzzleVQA: Diagnosing Multimodal Reasoning Challenges of Language Models with Abstract Visual Patterns

ACL 2024findings

Large multimodal models extend the impressive capabilities of large language models by integrating multimodal understanding abilities. However, it is not clear how they can emulate the general intelligence and reasoning ability of humans. As recognizing patterns and abstracting concepts are key to g…

2024

Reasoning Paths Optimization: Learning to Reason and Explore From Diverse Paths

EMNLP 2024finding

Advanced models such as OpenAI o1 exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities through step-by-step reasoning. However, they may still falter on more complex problems, making errors that disrupt their reasoning paths. We attribute this to the expansive solution space, where each step has the risk…

2024

Safety Arithmetic: A Framework for Test-time Safety Alignment of Language Models by Steering Parameters and Activations

EMNLP 2024main

Ensuring the safe alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as they become integral to applications like translation and question answering. Current alignment methods struggle with dynamic user intentions and complex objectives, making models vulnerable to generating ha…

2024

Self-Adaptive Sampling for Accurate Video Question Answering on Image Text Models

NAACL 2024findings

Image–text models (ITMs) is the prevalent architecture to solve video question–answering tasks, which requires only a few input frames to save huge computational cost compared to video–language models.However, we find existent ITM video question–answering solutions either 1) adopt simplistic and uni…

2024

Sowing the Wind, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Impact of Editing Language Models

ACL 2024findings

In the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence, the concept of ‘Red-Teaming’ or ‘Jailbreaking’ large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a crucial area of study. This approach is especially significant in terms of assessing and enhancing the safety and robustness of these models. This p…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

Understanding the Capabilities and Limitations of Large Language Models for Cultural Commonsense

NAACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial commonsense understanding through numerous benchmark evaluations. However, their understanding of cultural commonsense remains largely unexamined. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the capabilities and limitations of s…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2024

WalledEval: A Comprehensive Safety Evaluation Toolkit for Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024system demonstrations

WalledEval is a comprehensive AI safety testing toolkit designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs). It accommodates a diverse range of models, including both open-weight and API-based ones, and features over 35 safety benchmarks covering areas such as multilingual safety, exaggerated safety,…

2023

A Robust Information-Masking Approach for Domain Counterfactual Generation

ACL 2023findings

Domain shift is a big challenge in NLP. Many approaches, thus, resort to learning domain-invariant features to mitigate the hurdles of domain shift during inference. Such methods, however, inexorably fail to leverage the domain-specific nuances relevant to the task at hand. To avoid such drawbacks,…

2023

Evaluating Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Approaches on SURE Benchmark for Speech Understanding

ICASSP 2023accepted

Fine-tuning is widely used as the default algorithm for transfer learning from pre-trained models. Parameter inefficiency can however arise when, during transfer learning, all the parameters of a large pre-trained model need to be updated for individual downstream tasks. As the number of parameters…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Few-shot Joint Multimodal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis Based on Generative Multimodal Prompt

ACL 2023findings

We have witnessed the rapid proliferation of multimodal data on numerous social media platforms. Conventional studies typically require massive labeled data to train models for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA). However, collecting and annotating fine-grained multimodal data for MAB…

2023

LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

The success of large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4 and ChatGPT, has led to the development of numerous cost-effective and accessible alternatives that are created by finetuning open-access LLMs with task-specific data (e.g., ChatDoctor) or instruction data (e.g., Alpaca). Among the various fine…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Language Guided Visual Question Answering: Elevate Your Multimodal Language Model Using Knowledge-Enriched Prompts

EMNLP 2023short findings

Visual question answering (VQA) is the task of answering questions about an image. The task assumes an understanding of both the image and the question to provide a natural language answer. VQA has gained popularity in recent years due to its potential applications in a wide range of fields, includi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Multiple Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

ICASSP 2023accepted

Multimodal sentiment analysis has received extensive attention with the explosion of multimodal data. For multimodal data, representations should have disparate distributions in the feature space under different labels. The paired multi-modal image-text posts should be closer than unpaired. We propo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Uncertainty Guided Label Denoising for Document-level Distant Relation Extraction

ACL 2023long

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to infer complex semantic relations among entities in a document. Distant supervision (DS) is able to generate massive auto-labeled data, which can improve DocRE performance. Recent works leverage pseudo labels generated by the pre-denoising model to r…

2023

kNN-CM: A Non-parametric Inference-Phase Adaptation of Parametric Text Classifiers

EMNLP 2023long findings

Semi-parametric models exhibit the properties of both parametric and non-parametric modeling and have been shown to be effective in the next-word prediction language modeling task. However, there is a lack of studies on the text-discriminating properties of such models. We propose an inference-phase…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

A Dataset for Hyper-Relational Extraction and a Cube-Filling Approach

EMNLP 2022main

Relation extraction has the potential for large-scale knowledge graph construction, but current methods do not consider the qualifier attributes for each relation triplet, such as time, quantity or location. The qualifiers form hyper-relational facts which better capture the rich and complex knowled…

2022

Analyzing Modality Robustness in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

NAACL 2022long

Building robust multimodal models are crucial for achieving reliable deployment in the wild. Despite its importance, less attention has been paid to identifying and improving the robustness of Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) models. In this work, we hope to address that by (i) Proposing simple d…

2022

CICERO: A Dataset for Contextualized Commonsense Inference in Dialogues

ACL 2022long

This paper addresses the problem of dialogue reasoning with contextualized commonsense inference. We curate CICERO, a dataset of dyadic conversations with five types of utterance-level reasoning-based inferences: cause, subsequent event, prerequisite, motivation, and emotional reaction. The dataset…

2022

DoubleMix: Simple Interpolation-Based Data Augmentation for Text Classification

COLING 2022main

This paper proposes a simple yet effective interpolation-based data augmentation approach termed DoubleMix, to improve the robustness of models in text classification. DoubleMix first leverages a couple of simple augmentation operations to generate several perturbed samples for each training data, a…

2022

KNOT: Knowledge Distillation Using Optimal Transport for Solving NLP Tasks

COLING 2022main

We propose a new approach, Knowledge Distillation using Optimal Transport (KNOT), to distill the natural language semantic knowledge from multiple teacher networks to a student network. KNOT aims to train a (global) student model by learning to minimize the optimal transport cost of its assigned pro…

2022

Knowledge Enhanced Reflection Generation for Counseling Dialogues

ACL 2022long

In this paper, we study the effect of commonsense and domain knowledge while generating responses in counseling conversations using retrieval and generative methods for knowledge integration. We propose a pipeline that collects domain knowledge through web mining, and show that retrieval from both d…

2022

MM-Align: Learning Optimal Transport-based Alignment Dynamics for Fast and Accurate Inference on Missing Modality Sequences

EMNLP 2022main

Existing multimodal tasks mostly target at the complete input modality setting, i.e., each modality is either complete or completely missing in both training and test sets. However, the randomly missing situations have still been underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel approach named MM-Ali…

2022

PIP: Physical Interaction Prediction via Mental Simulation with Span Selection

ECCV 2022poster

"Accurate prediction of physical interaction outcomes is a crucial component of human intelligence and is important for safe and efficient deployments of robots in the real world. While there are existing vision-based intuitive physics models that learn to predict physical interaction outcomes, they…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

RelationPrompt: Leveraging Prompts to Generate Synthetic Data for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction

ACL 2022findings

Despite the importance of relation extraction in building and representing knowledge, less research is focused on generalizing to unseen relations types. We introduce the task setting of Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction (ZeroRTE) to encourage further research in low-resource relation extraction…

2022

SANCL: Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction with Selective Attention and Natural Contrastive Learning

COLING 2022main

With the boom of e-commerce, Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction (MRHP) that identifies the helpfulness score of multimodal product reviews has become a research hotspot. Previous work on this task focuses on attention-based modality fusion, information integration, and relation modeling, which…

2022

SAT: Improving Semi-Supervised Text Classification with Simple Instance-Adaptive Self-Training

EMNLP 2022finding

Self-training methods have been explored in recent years and have exhibited great performance in improving semi-supervised learning. This work presents a simple instance-adaptive self-training method (SAT) for semi-supervised text classification. SAT first generates two augmented views for each unla…

2022

So Different Yet So Alike! Constrained Unsupervised Text Style Transfer

ACL 2022long

Automatic transfer of text between domains has become popular in recent times. One of its aims is to preserve the semantic content while adapting to the target domain. However, it does not explicitly maintain other attributes between the source and translated text: e.g., text length and descriptiven…

2022

Two is Better than Many? Binary Classification as an Effective Approach to Multi-Choice Question Answering

EMNLP 2022main

We propose a simple refactoring of multi-choice question answering (MCQA) tasks as a series of binary classifications. The MCQA task is generally performed by scoring each (question, answer) pair normalized over all the pairs, and then selecting the answer from the pair that yield the highest score.…

2022

Vector-Quantized Input-Contextualized Soft Prompts for Natural Language Understanding

EMNLP 2022main

Prompt Tuning has been largely successful as a parameter-efficient method of conditioning large-scale pre-trained language models to perform downstream tasks. Thus far, soft prompt tuning learns a fixed set of task-specific continuous vectors, i.e., soft tokens that remain static across the task sam…

2021

Improving Multimodal Fusion with Hierarchical Mutual Information Maximization for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

EMNLP 2021main

In multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA), the performance of a model highly depends on the quality of synthesized embeddings. These embeddings are generated from the upstream process called multimodal fusion, which aims to extract and combine the input unimodal raw data to produce a richer multimodal…

Cited by 394SourcePDFScholar
2021

MTAG: Modal-Temporal Attention Graph for Unaligned Human Multimodal Language Sequences

NAACL 2021long

Human communication is multimodal in nature; it is through multiple modalities such as language, voice, and facial expressions, that opinions and emotions are expressed. Data in this domain exhibits complex multi-relational and temporal interactions. Learning from this data is a fundamentally challe…

2021

More Identifiable yet Equally Performant Transformers for Text Classification

ACL 2021long

Interpretability is an important aspect of the trustworthiness of a model’s predictions. Transformer’s predictions are widely explained by the attention weights, i.e., a probability distribution generated at its self-attention unit (head). Current empirical studies provide shreds of evidence that at…

2021

STaCK: Sentence Ordering with Temporal Commonsense Knowledge

EMNLP 2021main

Sentence order prediction is the task of finding the correct order of sentences in a randomly ordered document. Correctly ordering the sentences requires an understanding of coherence with respect to the chronological sequence of events described in the text. Document-level contextual understanding…