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Vishakh Padmakumar

14 accepted papers

2026

Measuring LLM Novelty As The Frontier Of Original And High-Quality Output

ICLR 2026poster

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for ideation and scientific discovery, it is important to evaluate their ability to generate novel output. Prior work evaluates novelty as originality with respect to model training data, but original outputs can be of low quality. In contrast, n…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Intent-aware Schema Generation and Refinement for Literature Review Tables

EMNLP 2025

The increasing volume of academic literature makes it essential for researchers to organize, compare, and contrast collections of documents. Large language models (LLMs) can support this process by generating schemas defining shared aspects along which to compare papers. However, progress on schema

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Principled Content Selection to Generate Diverse and Personalized Multi-Document Summaries

ACL 2025long

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of handling longer contexts, recent work has demonstrated that they exhibit the _”lost in the middle”_ phenomenon (Liu et al., 2024) of unevenly attending to different parts of the provided context. This hinders their ability to cover diver…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Transformers Struggle to Learn to Search

ICLR 2025poster

Search is an ability foundational in many important tasks, and recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) struggle to perform search robustly. It is unknown whether this inability is due to a lack of data, insufficient model parameters, or fundamental limitations of the transformer…

2025

Whose Boat Does it Float? Improving Personalization in Preference Tuning via Inferred User Personas

ACL 2025long

LLMs are aligned to follow input instructions by learning which of two responses users prefer for a prompt. However, such preference data do not convey *why* users prefer responses that are chosen or rejected, so LLMs trained on these datasets cannot tailor responses to varied user needs. To surface…

2023

Extrapolative Controlled Sequence Generation via Iterative Refinement

ICML 2023poster

We study the problem of extrapolative controlled generation, i.e., generating sequences with attribute values beyond the range seen in training. This task is of significant importance in automated design, especially drug discovery, where the goal is to design novel proteins that are better (e.g., mo…

2023

Reward Gaming in Conditional Text Generation

ACL 2023long

To align conditional text generation model outputs with desired behaviors, there has been an increasing focus on training the model using reinforcement learning (RL) with reward functions learned from human annotations. Under this framework, we identify three common cases where high rewards are inco…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

Testing the General Deductive Reasoning Capacity of Large Language Models Using OOD Examples

NeurIPS 2023poster

Given the intractably large size of the space of proofs, any model that is capable of general deductive reasoning must generalize to proofs of greater complexity. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) possess some abstract deductive reasoning ability given chain-of-thought prom…

2022

BBQ: A hand-built bias benchmark for question answering

ACL 2022findings

It is well documented that NLP models learn social biases, but little work has been done on how these biases manifest in model outputs for applied tasks like question answering (QA). We introduce the Bias Benchmark for QA (BBQ), a dataset of question-sets constructed by the authors that highlight at…

2022

Exploring the Role of Task Transferability in Large-Scale Multi-Task Learning

NAACL 2022long

Recent work has found that multi-task training with a large number of diverse tasks can uniformly improve downstream performance on unseen target tasks. In contrast, literature on task transferability has established that the choice of intermediate tasks can heavily affect downstream task performanc…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2022

Help me write a poem: Instruction Tuning as a Vehicle for Collaborative Poetry Writing

EMNLP 2022main

Recent work in training large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions has opened up exciting opportunities for natural language interface design. Building on the prior success of large language models in the realm of computer assisted creativity, in this work, we present CoPoe…

2022

QuALITY: Question Answering with Long Input Texts, Yes!

NAACL 2022long

To enable building and testing models on long-document comprehension, we introduce QuALITY, a multiple-choice QA dataset with context passages in English that have an average length of about 5,000 tokens, much longer than typical current models can process. Unlike in prior work with passages, our qu…