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Vidhisha Balachandran

19 accepted papers

2026

Just Do It!? Computer-Use Agents Exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness

ICLR 2026poster

We **color-coded** the added changes to the **paper** and **Appendix** for the comfort of our reviewers. Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are an increasingly deployed class of agents that take actions on GUIs to accomplish user goals. In this paper, we show that CUAs consistently exhibit *Blind Goal-Dir…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Sample More to Think Less: Group Filtered Policy Optimization for Concise Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models trained with reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards often inflate response length—trading brevity for accuracy. While longer reasoning can help on hard problems, many extra tokens are filler: verbose text making little progress. We introduce GFPO (Group Filtered Policy Op…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Tracing the Traces: Latent Temporal Signals for Efficient and Accurate Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Reasoning models improve their problem-solving ability through inference-time scaling, allocating more compute via longer token budgets. Identifying which reasoning traces are likely to succeed remains a key opportunity: reliably predicting productive paths can substantially reduce wasted computatio…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

FACTS&EVIDENCE: An Interactive Tool for Transparent Fine-Grained Factual Verification of Machine-Generated Text

NAACL 2025system demonstrations

With the widespread consumption of AI-generated content, there has been an increased focus on developing automated tools to verify the factual accuracy of such content. However, prior research and tools developed for fact verification treat it as a binary classification or a linear regression proble…

2025

Improving Instruction-Following in Language Models through Activation Steering

ICLR 2025poster

The ability to follow instructions is crucial for numerous real-world applications of language models. In pursuit of deeper insights and more powerful capabilities, we derive instruction-specific vector representations from language models and use them to steer models accordingly. These vectors are…

2025

Unearthing Skill-level Insights for Understanding Trade-offs of Foundation Models

ICLR 2025poster

With models getting stronger, evaluations have grown more complex, testing multiple skills in one benchmark and even in the same instance at once. However, skill-wise performance is obscured when inspecting aggregate accuracy, under-utilizing the rich signal modern benchmarks contain. We propose an…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Don’t Hallucinate, Abstain: Identifying LLM Knowledge Gaps via Multi-LLM Collaboration

ACL 2024long

Despite efforts to expand the knowledge of large language models (LLMs), knowledge gaps—missing or outdated information in LLMs—might always persist given the evolving nature of knowledge. In this work, we study approaches to identify LLM knowledge gaps and abstain from answering questions when know…

2024

Knowledge Card: Filling LLMs' Knowledge Gaps with Plug-in Specialized Language Models

ICLR 2024oral

By design, large language models (LLMs) are static general-purpose models, expensive to retrain or update frequently. As they are increasingly adopted for knowledge-intensive tasks, it becomes evident that these design choices lead to failures to generate factual, relevant, and up-to-date knowledge.…

2024

Knowledge Crosswords: Geometric Knowledge Reasoning with Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

We propose Knowledge Crosswords, a geometric knowledge reasoning benchmark consisting of incomplete knowledge networks bounded by structured factual constraints, where LLMs are tasked with inferring the missing facts to meet all constraints. The novel setting of geometric knowledge reasoning necessi…

2024

MediQ: Question-Asking LLMs and a Benchmark for Reliable Interactive Clinical Reasoning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Users typically engage with LLMs interactively, yet most existing benchmarks evaluate them in a static, single-turn format, posing reliability concerns in interactive scenarios. We identify a key obstacle towards reliability: LLMs are trained to answer any question, even with incomplete context or i…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2024

P3Sum: Preserving Author’s Perspective in News Summarization with Diffusion Language Models

NAACL 2024long

In this work, we take a first step towards designing summarization systems that are faithful to the author’s intent, not only the semantic content of the article. Focusing on a case study of preserving political perspectives in news summarization, we find that existing approaches alter the political…

2024

Teaching LLMs to Abstain across Languages via Multilingual Feedback

EMNLP 2024main

Multilingual LLMs often have knowledge disparities across languages, with larger gaps in under-resourced languages. Teaching LLMs to abstain in the face of knowledge gaps is thus a promising strategy to mitigate hallucinations in multilingual settings. However, previous studies on LLM abstention pri…

2024

The Art of Saying No: Contextual Noncompliance in Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Chat-based language models are designed to be helpful, yet they should not comply with every user request. While most existing work primarily focuses on refusal of ``unsafe'' queries, we posit that the scope of noncompliance should be broadened. We introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of contextual…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

FactKB: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation using Language Models Enhanced with Factual Knowledge

EMNLP 2023long main

Evaluating the factual consistency of automatically generated summaries is essential for the progress and adoption of reliable summarization systems. Despite recent advances, existing factuality evaluation models are not robust, being especially prone to entity and relation errors in new domains. We…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

Correcting Diverse Factual Errors in Abstractive Summarization via Post-Editing and Language Model Infilling

EMNLP 2022main

Abstractive summarization models often generate inconsistent summaries containing factual errors or hallucinated content. Recent works focus on correcting factual errors in generated summaries via post-editing. Such correction models are trained using adversarial non-factual summaries constructed us…

2021

DialoGraph: Incorporating Interpretable Strategy-Graph Networks into Negotiation Dialogues

ICLR 2021poster

To successfully negotiate a deal, it is not enough to communicate fluently: pragmatic planning of persuasive negotiation strategies is essential. While modern dialogue agents excel at generating fluent sentences, they still lack pragmatic grounding and cannot reason strategically. We present DialoGr…

2021

SELFEXPLAIN: A Self-Explaining Architecture for Neural Text Classifiers

EMNLP 2021main

We introduce SelfExplain, a novel self-explaining model that explains a text classifier’s predictions using phrase-based concepts. SelfExplain augments existing neural classifiers by adding (1) a globally interpretable layer that identifies the most influential concepts in the training set for a giv…

2021

Understanding Factuality in Abstractive Summarization with FRANK: A Benchmark for Factuality Metrics

NAACL 2021long

Modern summarization models generate highly fluent but often factually unreliable outputs. This motivated a surge of metrics attempting to measure the factuality of automatically generated summaries. Due to the lack of common benchmarks, these metrics cannot be compared. Moreover, all these methods…

2020

Differentiable Reasoning over a Virtual Knowledge Base

ICLR 2020talk

We consider the task of answering complex multi-hop questions using a corpus as a virtual knowledge base (KB). In particular, we describe a neural module, DrKIT, that traverses textual data like a KB, softly following paths of relations between mentions of entities in the corpus. At each step the mo…

Cited by 103SourceScholar