Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Jaemin Cho @jmincho.bsky.social · May 20

Some personal updates:
- I've completed my PhD at @unccs.bsky.social! 🎓
- Starting Fall 2026, I'll be joining the CS dept. at Johns Hopkins University @jhucompsci.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor 💙
- Currently exploring options for my gap year (Aug 2025 - Jul 2026), so feel free to reach out! 🔎

3 5 26

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Vaidehi Patil @vaidehipatil.bsky.social · May 7

🚨 Introducing our @tmlrorg.bsky.social paper “Unlearning Sensitive Information in Multimodal LLMs: Benchmark and Attack-Defense Evaluation”
We present UnLOK-VQA, a benchmark to evaluate unlearning in vision-and-language models, where both images and text may encode sensitive or private information.

1 8 10

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · May 5

Extremely excited to announce that I will be joining
@utaustin.bsky.social Computer Science in August 2025 as an Assistant Professor! 🎉

5 9 43

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Apr 30

🌵 I'm going to be presenting PBT at #NAACL2025 today at 2PM! Come by poster session 2 if you want to hear about:
-- balancing positive and negative persuasion
-- improving LLM teamwork/debate
-- training models on simulated dialogues

With @mohitbansal.bsky.social and @peterbhase.bsky.social

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Jan 23

🎉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
🧵 1/4

3 8

Justin Chih-Yao Chen @cyjustinchen.bsky.social · Apr 29

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2411.19865

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 & Google DeepMind and my advisor
@mohitbansal.bsky.social at @unccs.bsky.social

Justin Chih-Yao Chen @cyjustinchen.bsky.social · Apr 29

I will be presenting ✨Reverse Thinking Makes LLMs Stronger Reasoners✨at #NAACL2025!

In this work, we show
- Improvements across 12 datasets
- Outperforms SFT with 10x more data
- Strong generalization to OOD datasets

📅4/30 2:00-3:30 Hall 3

Let's chat about LLM reasoning and its future directions!

Justin Chih-Yao Chen @cyjustinchen.bsky.social · Dec 2

🚨 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)!

1 3 5

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Shoubin Yu @shoubin.bsky.social · Mar 19

Introducing VEGGIE 🥦—a unified, end-to-end, and versatile instructional video generative model.

VEGGIE supports 8 skills, from object addition/removal/changing, and stylization to concept grounding/reasoning. It exceeds SoTA and shows 0-shot multimodal instructional & in-context video editing.

1 4 5

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Feb 5

🚨 Check out "UTGen & UTDebug" for learning to automatically generate unit tests (i.e., discovering inputs which break your code) and then applying them to debug code with LLMs, with strong gains (>12% pass@1) across multiple models/datasets! (see details in 🧵👇)

1/4

Archiki Prasad @archiki.bsky.social · Feb 4

🚨 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:

🧵👇

1 4 7

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Feb 4

🚨 Excited to announce UTGen and UTDebug, where we first learn to generate unit tests and then apply them to debugging generated code with LLMs, with strong gains (+12% pass@1) on LLM-based debugging across multiple models/datasets via inf.-time scaling and cross-validation+backtracking!

🧵👇

Archiki Prasad @archiki.bsky.social · Feb 4

🚨 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:

🧵👇

5 8

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Archiki Prasad @archiki.bsky.social · Feb 4

🚨 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:

🧵👇

1 7 18

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Jan 27

🎉 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
...
🧵

1 9 18

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Jan 23

🎉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
🧵 1/4

1 8 21

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Jan 21

Thanks @AAAI for selecting me as a #AAAI Fellow! Very humbled+excited to be a part of the respected cohort of this+past years' fellows (& congrats everyone)! 🙏

100% credit goes to my amazing past/current students+postdocs+collab for their work (& thanks to mentors+family)!💙
aaai.org/about-aaai/a...

UNC-Chapel Hill Computer Science @unccs.bsky.social · Jan 21

🎉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...

5 17

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

UNC-Chapel Hill Computer Science @unccs.bsky.social · Jan 21

🎉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...

4 10

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Jan 15

Deeply honored & humbled to have received the Presidential #PECASE Award by the @WhiteHouse and @POTUS office! 🙏

Most importantly, very grateful to my amazing mentors, students, postdocs, collaborators, and friends+family for making this possible, and for making the journey worthwhile + beautiful 💙

UNC-Chapel Hill Computer Science @unccs.bsky.social · Jan 15

🎉 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...

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

5 8 43

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Dec 23

🚨 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 🙏

1 15 37

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Jaemin Cho @jmincho.bsky.social · Dec 12

I'm now at #NeurIPS2024! 🔥
(yeah, I'm the one with the red Santa hat🧑‍🎄)

On Dec 13 PM, I present SELMA, co led with Jialu Li!
👉 improving the faithfulness of T2I models with automatically generated image-text pairs, with skill-specific expert learning and merging!

P.S. I'm on the faculty job market👇

Jaemin Cho @jmincho.bsky.social · Dec 7

🚨 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)!

👇🧵

1 2 7

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Jaemin Cho @jmincho.bsky.social · Dec 7

🚨 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)!

👇🧵

2 10 30

Justin Chih-Yao Chen @cyjustinchen.bsky.social · Dec 5

Elias is an outstanding researcher and mentor, exceptionally intelligent and brilliant with so many good ideas. I'm excited to see all the incredible things he'll accomplish as a professor!

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Dec 5

🚨 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

🧵👇

1 4

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Tanishq Mathew Abraham @iscienceluvr.bsky.social · Dec 2

Reverse Thinking Makes LLMs Stronger Reasoners

abs: arxiv.org/abs/2411.19865

Train an LLM to be able to generate forward reasoning from question, backward question, and backward reaoning from backward question

Shows an average 13.53% improvement over the student model’s zero-shot performance

10 54

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Dec 3

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" ➡️➡️

🧵👇

Niranjan @niranjanb.bsky.social · Dec 3

Excited to host the wonderful @mohitbansal.bsky.social as part of Stony Brook CS Distinguished Lecture Series on Dec 6th. Looking forward to hearing about his team's fantastic work on Planning Agents for Collaborative Reasoning and Multimodal Generation. More here: tinyurl.com/jkmex3e9

A flyer announcing that Professor Mohit Bansal from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill will present a Distinguished Lecture on Planning Agents for Collaborative Reasoning and Multimodal Generation at 2:30 PM in the New Computer Science Room 120 on Dec 6th 2024. The flyer also has a head shot of Mohit Bansal.

1 8 23

Reposted by Justin Chih-Yao Chen

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Dec 2

🚨Just read an exciting new paper from Justin 👇 on how to get the benefits of reasoning backwards (i.e. starting with the solution and tracing it back to the question) into a model while keeping the test-time cost of reasoning the same!

🧵1/3

Justin Chih-Yao Chen @cyjustinchen.bsky.social · Dec 2

🚨 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)!

2 2 9

Justin Chih-Yao Chen @cyjustinchen.bsky.social · Dec 2

Thanks Elias!! 😄

1

Justin Chih-Yao Chen @cyjustinchen.bsky.social · Dec 2

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

1 3

Justin Chih-Yao Chen @cyjustinchen.bsky.social · Dec 2

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2411.19865
Huggingface: huggingface.co/papers/2411.... Code: coming soon!

Reverse Thinking Makes LLMs Stronger Reasoners

Reverse thinking plays a crucial role in human reasoning. Humans can reason not only from a problem to a solution but also in reverse, i.e., start from the solution and reason towards the problem. Thi...

arxiv.org

1