← Search

Sunita Sarawagi

34 accepted papers

2025

Diverse In-Context Example Selection After Decomposing Programs and Aligned Utterances Improves Semantic Parsing

NAACL 2025long

LLMs are increasingly used as seq2seq translators from natural language utterances to structured programs, a process called semantic interpretation. Unlike atomic labels or token sequences, programs are naturally represented as abstract syntax trees (ASTs). Such structured representation raises nove…

2025

From Search to Sampling: Generative Models for Robust Algorithmic Recourse

ICLR 2025poster

Algorithmic Recourse provides recommendations to individuals who are adversely impacted by automated model decisions, on how to alter their profiles to achieve a favorable outcome. Effective recourse methods must balance three conflicting goals: proximity to the original profile to minimize cost, pl…

2025

RECAST: Retrieval-Augmented Contextual ASR via Decoder-State Keyword Spotting

EMNLP 2025

Contextual biasing in ASR systems is critical for recognizing rare, domain-specific terms but becomes impractical with large keyword dictionaries due to prompt size and latency constraints. We present RECAST–a lightweight retrieval-augmented approach that repurposes decoder states of a pretrained AS

2025

Robust Root Cause Diagnosis using In-Distribution Interventions

ICLR 2025poster

Diagnosing the root cause of an anomaly in a complex interconnected system is a pressing problem in today’s cloud services and industrial operations. We propose In-Distribution Interventions (IDI), a novel algorithm that predicts root cause as nodes that meet two criteria: 1) Anomaly: root cause nod…

2025

Synthetic Tabular Data Generation for Imbalanced Classification: The Surprising Effectiveness of an Overlap Class

AAAI 2025technical

Handling imbalance in class distribution when building a classifier over tabular data has been a problem of long-standing interest. One popular approach is augmenting the training dataset with synthetically generated data. While classical augmentation techniques were limited to linear interpolatio…

2024

Continuous Treatment Effect Estimation Using Gradient Interpolation and Kernel Smoothing

AAAI 2024technical

We address the Individualized continuous treatment effect (ICTE) estimation problem where we predict the effect of any continuous valued treatment on an individual using ob- servational data. The main challenge in this estimation task is the potential confounding of treatment assignment with in- div…

2024

Efficient Training of Language Models with Compact and Consistent Next Token Distributions

ACL 2024findings

Maximizing the likelihood of the next token is an established, statistically sound objective for pre-training language models. In this paper we show that we can train better models faster by pre-aggregating the corpus with a collapsed n-gram distribution. Previous studies have proposed corpus-level…

2024

PairNet: Training with Observed Pairs to Estimate Individual Treatment Effect

ICML 2024poster

Given a dataset of individuals each described by a covariate vector, a treatment, and an observed outcome on the treatment, the goal of the individual treatment effect (ITE) estimation task is to predict outcome changes resulting from a change in treatment. A fundamental challenge is that in the obs…

2023

Benchmarking and Improving Text-to-SQL Generation under Ambiguity

EMNLP 2023long main

Research in Text-to-SQL conversion has been largely benchmarked against datasets where each text query corresponds to one correct SQL. However, natural language queries over real-life databases frequently involve significant ambiguity about the intended SQL due to overlapping schema names and multi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

CRUSH4SQL: Collective Retrieval Using Schema Hallucination For Text2SQL

EMNLP 2023long main

Existing Text-to-SQL generators require the entire schema to be encoded with the user text. This is expensive or impractical for large databases with tens of thousands of columns. Standard dense retrieval techniques are inadequate for schema subsetting of a large structured database, where the cor…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Conditional Tree Matching for Inference-Time Adaptation of Tree Prediction Models

ICML 2023poster

We present CTreeOT, a convergent, differentiable algorithm for matching two trees when each tree is conditioned on some input. Such conditional tree matching is useful for light-weight, few-shot adaptation of tree prediction models without parameter fine-tuning. CTreeOT includes an alignment algorit…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

In-Situ Text-Only Adaptation of Speech Models with Low-Overhead Speech Imputations

ICLR 2023poster

Fast and accurate adaptation of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems using only text data in the target domain is a problem of long-standing practical relevance. Text-only adaptation was easy in traditional cascaded ASR systems with completely decoupled acoustic and language models. Recently,…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

Speech-enriched Memory for Inference-time Adaptation of ASR Models to Word Dictionaries

EMNLP 2023long main

Despite the impressive performance of ASR models on mainstream benchmarks, their performance on rare words is unsatisfactory. In enterprise settings, often a focused list of entities (such as locations, names, etc) are available which can be used to adapt the model to the terminology of specific dom…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Structured Case-Based Reasoning for Inference-Time Adaptation of Text-to-SQL Parsers

AAAI 2023technical

Inference-time adaptation methods for semantic parsing are useful for leveraging examples from newly-observed domains without repeated fine-tuning. Existing approaches typically bias the decoder by simply concatenating input-output example pairs (cases) from the new domain at the encoder’s input in…

2022

Accurate Online Posterior Alignments for Principled Lexically-Constrained Decoding

ACL 2022long

Online alignment in machine translation refers to the task of aligning a target word to a source word when the target sequence has only been partially decoded. Good online alignments facilitate important applications such as lexically constrained translation where user-defined dictionaries are used…

2022

Adaptive Discounting of Implicit Language Models in RNN-Transducers

ICASSP 2022accepted

RNN-Transducer (RNN-T) models have become synonymous with streaming end-to-end ASR systems. While they perform competitively on a number of evaluation categories, rare words pose a serious challenge to RNN-T models. One main reason for the degradation in performance on rare words is that the languag…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Coherent Probabilistic Aggregate Queries on Long-horizon Forecasts

IJCAI 2022poster

Long range forecasts are the starting point of many decision support systems that need to draw inference from high-level aggregate patterns on forecasted values. State of the art time-series forecasting methods are either subject to concept drift on long-horizon forecasts, or fail to accurately pred…

2022

Diverse Parallel Data Synthesis for Cross-Database Adaptation of Text-to-SQL Parsers

EMNLP 2022main

Text-to-SQL parsers typically struggle with databases unseen during the train time. Adapting Text-to-SQL parsers to new database schemas is a challenging problem owing to a vast diversity of schemas and zero availability of natural language queries in new schemas. We present ReFill, a framework for…

2022

Focus on the Common Good: Group Distributional Robustness Follows

ICLR 2022poster

We consider the problem of training a classification model with group annotated training data. Recent work has established that, if there is distribution shift across different groups, models trained using the standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) objective suffer from poor performance on minor…

2022

Learning Recourse on Instance Environment to Enhance Prediction Accuracy

NeurIPS 2022accept

Machine Learning models are often susceptible to poor performance on instances sampled from bad environments. For example, an image classifier could provide low accuracy on images captured under low lighting conditions. In high stake ML applications, such as AI-driven medical diagnostics, a better o…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

Overlap-based Vocabulary Generation Improves Cross-lingual Transfer Among Related Languages

ACL 2022long

Pre-trained multilingual language models such as mBERT and XLM-R have demonstrated great potential for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to low web-resource languages (LRL). However, due to limited model capacity, the large difference in the sizes of available monolingual corpora between high web-res…

2021

Active Assessment of Prediction Services as Accuracy Surface Over Attribute Combinations

NeurIPS 2021poster

Our goal is to evaluate the accuracy of a black-box classification model, not as a single aggregate on a given test data distribution, but as a surface over a large number of combinations of attributes characterizing multiple test data distributions. Such attributed accuracy measures become importa…

2021

Error-Driven Fixed-Budget ASR Personalization for Accented Speakers

ICASSP 2021accepted

We consider the task of personalizing ASR models while being constrained by a fixed budget on recording speaker specific utterances. Given a speaker and an ASR model, we propose a method of identifying sentences for which the speaker’s utterances are likely to be harder for the given ASR model to re…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Exploiting Language Relatedness for Low Web-Resource Language Model Adaptation: An Indic Languages Study

ACL 2021long

Recent research in multilingual language models (LM) has demonstrated their ability to effectively handle multiple languages in a single model. This holds promise for low web-resource languages (LRL) as multilingual models can enable transfer of supervision from high resource languages to LRLs. Howe…

2021

Training for the Future: A Simple Gradient Interpolation Loss to Generalize Along Time

NeurIPS 2021poster

In several real world applications, machine learning models are deployed to make predictions on data whose distribution changes gradually along time, leading to a drift between the train and test distributions. Such models are often re-trained on new data periodically, and they hence need to general…

2020

Efficient Domain Generalization via Common-Specific Low-Rank Decomposition

ICML 2020poster

Domain generalization refers to the task of training a model which generalizes to new domains that are not seen during training. We present CSD (Common Specific Decomposition), for this setting, which jointly learns a common component (which generalizes to new domains) and a domain specific componen…

2020

Learning from Rules Generalizing Labeled Exemplars

ICLR 2020spotlight

In many applications labeled data is not readily available, and needs to be collected via pain-staking human supervision. We propose a rule-exemplar method for collecting human supervision to combine the efficiency of rules with the quality of instance labels. The supervision is coupled such that it…

Cited by 98SourcecodeScholar
2018

Generalizing Across Domains via Cross-Gradient Training

ICLR 2018poster

We present CROSSGRAD , a method to use multi-domain training data to learn a classifier that generalizes to new domains. CROSSGRAD does not need an adaptation phase via labeled or unlabeled data, or domain features in the new domain. Most existing domain adaptation methods attempt to erase domain si…

2018

Trainable Calibration Measures for Neural Networks from Kernel Mean Embeddings

ICML 2018oral

Modern neural networks have recently been found to be poorly calibrated, primarily in the direction of over-confidence. Methods like entropy penalty and temperature smoothing improve calibration by clamping confidence, but in doing so compromise the many legitimately confident predictions. We propos…