UNC-Chapel Hill Computer Science

✈️ Heading to #NAACL2025 to present 3 main conf. papers, covering training LLMs to balance accepting and rejecting persuasion, multi-agent refinement for more faithful generation, and adaptively addressing varying knowledge conflict.

Reach out if you want to chat!

🎉 A big congratulations to @archiki.bsky.social (advised by Prof. @mohitbansal.bsky.social) for the being awarded the 2025 Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD Fellowship!", we are proud of you! 👏

Kandyce Brennan, Tianlong Chen, and Bianca Allison

Prof. Tianlong Chen has been working with UNC medical professionals to develop an AI-driven chatbot designed to encourage candid conversations about reproduction and safe sex, informed by the latest scientific evidence.

Read More: tracs.unc.edu/index.php/ne...

UNC robotics researchers have 9 papers accepted to ICRA and HRI - Computer Science The Department of Computer Science had nine papers accepted to the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction and the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA),...

📣 Thrilled to announce: UNC CS landed 9 papers at HRI and ICRA — two of the world's leading robotics conferences 🎉

The groundbreaking work spans robotics, real-time systems, and AI

cs.unc.edu/news-article...

🚨 Excited to share: "Learning to Generate Unit Tests for Automated Debugging" 🚨
which introduces ✨UTGen and UTDebug✨ for teaching LLMs to generate unit tests (UTs) and debugging code from generated tests.

UTGen+UTDebug yields large gains in debugging (+12% pass@1) & addresses 3 key questions:

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A collage of logos from several conferences at which UNC CS researchers had research publications recognized

In 2024, UNC CS researchers won paper awards and had presentations and publications recognized at conferences including ACSAC, CVPR, ECRTS, HRI, ICLR, KDD, NeurIPS, RTNS, and WACV.

Check out our recognized papers here: cs.unc.edu/about/awards...

UNC CS has hired 15 tenure-track faculty members in AI, security, systems, robotics, graphics, computational biology, and data visualization and also 6 teaching faculty members

UNC CS has added 15 tenure-track and 6 teaching faculty members over the past 4 academic years and has partnered with @uncsdss.bsky.social on additional hires! The new additions strengthen our pillar research areas and create collaboration opportunities across the department and campus.

The Department of Computer Science now has the rare privilege of being home to two PECASE recipients, Ron Alterovitz and @mohitbansal.bsky.social.

Congratulations again to both professors!

🎉 Congrats to the awesome students, postdocs, & collaborators for this exciting batch of #ICLR2025 and #NAACL2025 accepted papers (FYI some are on the academic/industry job market and a great catch 🙂), on diverse, important topics such as:

-- adaptive data generation environments/policies
...
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🎉Very excited that our work on Persuasion-Balanced Training has been accepted to #NAACL2025! We introduce a multi-agent tree-based method for teaching models to balance:

1️⃣ Accepting persuasion when it helps
2️⃣ Resisting persuasion when it hurts (e.g. misinformation)

arxiv.org/abs/2410.14596
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🎉Congratulations to Prof. @mohitbansal.bsky.social on being named a 2025 @RealAAAI Fellow for "significant contributions to multimodal AI foundations & faithful language generation and summarization." 👏

16 Fellows chosen worldwide by cmte. of 9 past fellows & ex-president: aaai.org/about-aaai/a...

More info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preside...

Parker Distinguished Professor received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

🎉 Congratulations to Prof. @mohitbansal.bsky.social for receiving the Presidential #PECASE Award by @WhiteHouse, which is the highest honor bestowed by US govt. on outstanding scientists/engineers who show exceptional potential for leadership early in their careers!

whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-up...

🚨 We have postdoc openings at UNC 🙂

Exciting+diverse NLP/CV/ML topics**, freedom to create research agenda, competitive funding, very strong students, mentorship for grant writing, collabs w/ many faculty+universities+companies, superb quality of life/weather.

Please apply + help spread the word 🙏

🚨 I am on the faculty job market this year 🚨
I will be presenting at #NeurIPS2024 and am happy to chat in-person or digitally!

I work on developing AI agents that can collaborate and communicate robustly with us and each other.

More at: esteng.github.io and in thread below

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🚨I’m traveling to #NeurIPS2024 next week to present these papers.

(1/3) 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐔𝐧𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝-𝐑𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐄𝐅𝐓

A new PEFT method replacing low-rank matrices (LoRA) with more expressive structured matrices

arxiv.org/abs/2406.17740

🚨 I’m on the academic job market!
j-min.io

I work on ✨Multimodal AI✨, advancing reasoning in understanding & generation by:
1⃣ Making it scalable
2⃣ Making it faithful
3⃣ Evaluating + refining it

Completing my PhD at UNC (w/ @mohitbansal.bsky.social).
Happy to connect (will be at #NeurIPS2024)!

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Looking forward to giving this Distinguished Lecture at StonyBrook next week & meeting the several awesome NLP + CV folks there - thanks Niranjan‬ + all for the kind invitation 🙂

PS. Excited to give a new talk on "Planning Agents for Collaborative Reasoning and Multimodal Generation" ➡️➡️

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🚨 Reverse Thinking Makes LLMs Stronger Reasoners

We can often reason from a problem to a solution and also in reverse to enhance our overall reasoning. RevThink shows that LLMs can also benefit from reverse thinking 👉 13.53% gains + sample efficiency + strong generalization (on 4 OOD datasets)!

Awesome collaboration with Zifeng Wang, Hamid Palangi, Rujun Han, Sayna Ebrahimi, Long Le, Vincent Perot, @swarooprm7.bsky.social, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister at Google Cloud AI and @googledeepind.bsky.social and my advisor @mohitbansal.bsky.social at @unccs.bsky.social

Congratulations to #UNC CS student David Wan for winning the prestigious 2024 Google PhD Fellowship in NLP. 🎉🥳

A very well-deserved honor for his impactful work on factual and faithful text+multimodal generation with Prof. @mohitbansal.bsky.social and UNC NLP group!

▶️ blog.google/technology/r...

APPLY: TENURE-TRACK/TEACHING FACULTY. Research areas include but not limited to: ML, NLP, vision, graphics, systems, bioinformatics, security, medical imaging, robotics, RT systems, AR/VR. Join our team—committed to research, teaching, and collaboration.

➡️https://cs.unc.edu/faculty-hiring/