Rabiraj Banerjee

#acl2025 anyone get a good quote of phil resnik's last comment?

context: (some?all?) panelists & him agree the field needs more deep, careful research on smaller models to do better science. everyone is frustrated with impossibility of large-scale pretraining experiments

@kennyjoseph.bsky.social , Kenny check this thread out

aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-m..., for Active Learning I really liked this paper, uses LLMs as annotator for knowledge distillation for small LMs

What are your favorite recent papers on using LMs for annotation (especially in a loop with human annotators), synthetic data for task-specific prediction, active learning, and similar?

Looking for practical methods for settings where human annotations are costly.

A few examples in thread ↴

This is so mean !!!

Assistant, Associate or Full Professor, AI & Society The Department of AI and Society (AIS) at the University at Buffalo (UB) invites candidates to apply for multiple positions as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Full Professor. The new AIS ...

UB's new Department of AI and Society is hiring faculty across ranks (Assistant, Associate, Full Professor). We’re looking for transdisciplinary scholars interested in building AI by society, for society. Start dates begin Fall 2025.

More info: www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/57734

Do different prompting methods yield a common task representation in language models? Demonstrations and instructions are two primary approaches for prompting language models to perform in-context learning (ICL) tasks. Do identical tasks elicited in different ways result in similar rep...

Took me a second, but I knew I'd seen something related to this recently:

arxiv.org/abs/2505.120...

Check out our take on Chain-of-Thought.
I really like this paper as a survey on the current literature on what CoT is, but more importantly on what it's not.
It also serves as a cautionary tale to the (apparently quite common) misuse of CoT as an interpretable method.

These are just battle scars of doing Data Science and ML Engineering in the industry!!

Screenshot of website The Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing is hosting the 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society, October 27-29, 2025. Overview The Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society aims to explore the future of computing for health, sustainability, human-centered AI, and policy. The summit will bring together luminary researchers in computing for health, sustainability, human-centered AI, and tech policy to lay out the frontiers of these critical fields, and to plot out how they must evolve.

Hi everyone. I'm excited to announce that I will be organizing a 2nd Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society rcais.github.io October 27-29, 2025.

We will explore the future of computing for health, sustainability, human-centered AI, and policy.

Please consider submitting a 1-page abstract

Send him a note of appreciation 😊

To @pcarragher.bsky.social @lleibm.bsky.social , @jmendelsohn2.bsky.social , Evan and Catherine, and others for some really fruitful and nice convos, hope to see you all soon.

A huge shoutout to the organizing team, and to the web chair
@andersgiovanni.com
for updating the schedule in such an easy to follow manner, hope you get some well deserved rest (as an ex web chair I know the pain)

So ICWSM concluded today and it was a blast, was a great honor to attend @icwsm.bsky.social at Copenhagen and present my work with @kennyjoseph.bsky.social and other colleagues. The paper link is here :
ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...,

This is great! The idea is somewhat obvious (good!), and I'm sure many have toyed with the connection to learning-to-rank. However, no work had developed it. This should be relevant for constructing valid PIs from just preferential feedback. openreview.net/pdf?id=ENJd3...

Me we were in the same session :) (Session 8)

🚨 New preprint! 🚨
Phase transitions! We love to see them during LM training. Syntactic attention structure, induction heads, grokking; they seem to suggest the model has learned a discrete, interpretable concept. Unfortunately, they’re pretty rare—or are they?

Generative language systems are everywhere, and many of them stereotype, demean, or erase particular social groups.

Alright, people, let's be honest: GenAI systems are everywhere, and figuring out whether they're any good is a total mess. Should we use them? Where? How? Do they need a total overhaul?

(1/6)

🧵 1/ Las redes están llenas de odio. ¿Puede la inteligencia artificial ayudarnos a detectarlo…

⚖️ sin discriminar,
🚫 sin reforzar estereotipos,
🔁 y sin aprender a odiar?

Esa es la gran pregunta de mi tesis.

👇 Te lo cuento en este #HiloTesis @crueuniversidades.bsky.social @filarramendi.bsky.social

As we go through a lot of excitement about RL recently with lots of cool work/results, here is a reminder that RL with a reverse KL-regularizer to the base model cannot learn any new skills that were not already present in the base model. It can only amplify the weak skills.
👇

My path into AI How I got here. Building a career brick by brick over 8 years.

My path into AI
The sort of small wins that accumulate into a real career in AI.
When I started grad school AI prof's didn't have space for me in their group and when I ended I had no papers at NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML, yet the process can still work.
www.interconnects.ai/p/my-path-in...

I posted this on LinkedIn too and it has over 600 reactions there, with the caveat that I don't know how many are from bots.

Out of all the mountains of work on "debiasing" word2vec, BERT, and LLMs, what anecdotes or evidence do we have that debiasing techniques have *actually been used in practice*, in industry or research?

(not referring to "cultural alignment" techniques)

(bonus if used and *to good effect*)

Training with more data = better LLMs, right? 🚨

False! Scaling language models by adding more pre-training data can decrease your performance after post-training!
Introducing "catastrophic overtraining." 🥁🧵👇

arxiv.org/abs/2503.19206

1/10

US tech firms - IME - rely heavily on grads of higher ed in general, and US higher ed in particular...

And yet I've not heard much noise from the Pichais, Nadellas, Zuckerbergs, Cooks, Benioffs, Sus, Jassys, Huangs, etc. about attacks on higher education...

Am I missing it or does it not exist?

Not a bad turnout for a Friday afternoon

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton are the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. In a series of papers beginning...

RL is so back!

(well, for some of us, it never really left)

awards.acm.org/about/2024-t...

Measuring Faithfulness of Chains of Thought by Unlearning Reasoning Steps When prompted to think step-by-step, language models (LMs) produce a chain of thought (CoT), a sequence of reasoning steps that the model supposedly used to produce its prediction. However, despite mu...

🚨🚨 New preprint 🚨🚨

Ever wonder whether verbalized CoTs correspond to the internal reasoning process of the model?

We propose a novel parametric faithfulness approach, which erases information contained in CoT steps from the model parameters to assess CoT faithfulness.

arxiv.org/abs/2502.14829

Rare that a paper these days uses the original literature of "Outcome reward model" and not just doing bradley-terry model on right/wrong labels.
Nature is healing.

Exploring the Limit of Outcome Reward for Learning Mathematical Reasoning
Lyu et al
arxiv.org/abs/2502.06781