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Timothee Mickus

10 accepted papers

2026

Knowledge Distillation as Decontamination? Revisiting the “Data Laundering” Concern

ICLR 2026poster

Concerns have been raised that knowledge distillation may transfer test-set knowledge from a contaminated teacher to a clean student—a “data laundering” effect that potentially threatens evaluation integrity. In this paper, we assess the severity of this phenomenon. If these concerns regarding data…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Can Out-of-Distribution Evaluations Uncover Reliance on Prediction Shortcuts? A Case Study in Question Answering

EMNLP 2025

A large body of recent work assesses models’ generalization capabilities through the lens of performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. Despite their practicality, such evaluations build upon a strong assumption: that OOD evaluations can capture and reflect upon possible failures in a real-w

2025

Pre-trained Language Models Learn Remarkably Accurate Representations of Numbers

EMNLP 2025

Pretrained language models (LMs) are prone to arithmetic errors. Existing work showed limited success in probing numeric values from models’ representations, indicating that these errors can be attributed to the inherent unreliability of distributionally learned embeddings in representing exact quan

2024

A Comparison of Language Modeling and Translation as Multilingual Pretraining Objectives

EMNLP 2024main

Pretrained language models (PLMs) display impressive performances and have captured the attention of the NLP community.Establishing best practices in pretraining has, therefore, become a major focus of NLP research, especially since insights gained from monolingual English models may not necessarily…

2024

Can Machine Translation Bridge Multilingual Pretraining and Cross-lingual Transfer Learning?

COLING 2024main

Multilingual pretraining and fine-tuning have remarkably succeeded in various natural language processing tasks. Transferring representations from one language to another is especially crucial for cross-lingual learning. One can expect machine translation objectives to be well suited to fostering su…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Grounded and well-rounded: a methodological approach to the study of cross-modal and cross-lingual grounding

EMNLP 2023long findings

Grounding has been argued to be a crucial component towards the development of more complete and truly semantically competent artificial intelligence systems. Literature has divided into two camps: While some argue that grounding allows for qualitatively different generalizations, others believe it…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

So many design choices: Improving and interpreting neural agent communication in signaling games

ACL 2023findings

Emergent language games are experimental protocols designed to model how communication may arise among a group of agents. In this paper, we focus on how to improve performances of neural agents playing a signaling game: a sender is exposed to an image and generates a sequence of symbols that is tran…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2020

What Meaning-Form Correlation Has to Compose With: A Study of MFC on Artificial and Natural Language

COLING 2020main

Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze meaning-form correlation on three sets of languages: (i) artificial t…