Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Apr 24

Life update! Excited to announce that I’ll be starting as an assistant professor at Cornell Info Sci in August 2026! I’ll be recruiting students this upcoming cycle!

An abundance of thanks to all my mentors and friends who helped make this possible!!

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Myra Cheng @myra.bsky.social · Apr 27

New ICLR blogpost! 🎉 We argue that understanding the impact of anthropomorphic AI is critical to understanding the impact of AI.

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Sourav @souravmishra.bsky.social · Apr 8

Big win for Stanford NLP to have @yejinchoinka.bsky.social Looking forward to new amazing directions

Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · Apr 4

Look who we found hanging out in her new Stanford Gates Computer Science office!

We’re truly delighted to welcome @yejinchoinka.bsky.social as a new @stanfordnlp.bsky.social faculty member, starting full-time in September. ❤️

nlp.stanford.edu/people/

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Will Held @williamheld.com · Apr 10

The Model Context Protocol is cool because it gives external developers a way to add meaningful functionality on top of LLM platforms.

To limit test this, I made a "Realtime Voice" MCP using free STT, VAD, and TTS systems. The result is a janky, but makes me me excited about the ecosystem to come!

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Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · Apr 4

Look who we found hanging out in her new Stanford Gates Computer Science office!

We’re truly delighted to welcome @yejinchoinka.bsky.social as a new @stanfordnlp.bsky.social faculty member, starting full-time in September. ❤️

nlp.stanford.edu/people/

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Dr. Shuchi Grover @shuchig.bsky.social · Mar 30

#WomensHistoryMonth: Honoring trailblazing #WomenOfAI whose research has made an impact on the current #AI/ML revolution incl. @anima-anandkumar.bsky.social @timnitgebru.bsky.social @mmitchell.bsky.social @deviparikh.bsky.social @ajlunited.bsky.social @yejinchoinka.bsky.social @drfeifei.bsky.social

Collage with 20 trailblazing Women of AI- Anima Anandakumar, Ayanna Howard, Cynthia Breazeal, Cynthia Rudin, Daphne Koller, Devi Parikh, Doina Precup, Fei-Fei Li, Hanna Hajishirzi, Joelle Pineau, Joy Buolamwini, Latanya Sweeney, Leslie Kaelbling, Margaret Mitchell, Melanie Mitchell, Niki Parmar, Rana el Kaliouby, Regina Barzilay, Timnit Gebru, Yejin Choi

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Stanford HAI @stanfordhai.bsky.social · Mar 28

Stanford scholars introduced an open-source AI agent that learns how to navigate websites by mimicking childhood learning – an approach that could lead to more efficient, transparent, and privacy-conscious AI: hai.stanford.edu/news/an-open...

@chrmanning.bsky.social @shikharmurty.bsky.social

An Open-Source AI Agent for Doing Tasks on the Web | Stanford HAI

NNetNav learns how to navigate websites by mimicking childhood learning through exploration.

hai.stanford.edu

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Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Mar 27

Teaching for the first time: I finished the last official lecture of the class and got a surprise round of applause! Feels so great!

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Martijn Bartelds @mbartelds.bsky.social · Mar 12

🎙️ Speech recognition is great - if you speak the right language.

Our new @stanfordnlp.bsky.social paper introduces CTC-DRO, a training method that reduces worst-language errors by up to 47.1%.

Work w/ Ananjan, Moussa, @jurafsky.bsky.social, Tatsu Hashimoto and Karen Livescu.

Here’s how it works 🧵

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Nathan Schneider @complingy.bsky.social · Mar 11

Our survey highlights the enduring influence of linguistics on #NLProc. We emphasize 6 facets: Resources, Evaluation, Low-resource settings, Interpretability, Explanation, and the Study of language.

Juri Opitz @nlopitz.bsky.social · Mar 11

Happy to share that our paper, "Natural Language Processing RELIES on Linguistics," will appear in Computational Linguistics!

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2405.05966

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Kyle Mahowald (COLM 2025) @kmahowald.bsky.social · Mar 11

Check it out for cool plots like this about how affinities between words in sentences and how they can show how Green Day isn't like green paint or green tea. And congrats to @coryshain.bsky.social and the CLiMB lab! climblab.org

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Cory Shain @coryshain.bsky.social · Mar 11

🚨 First preprint from the lab! 🚨 Josh Rozner (w/@weissweiler.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social) uses counterfactual experiments on LMs to show that word distributions can provide a learning signal for diverse syntactic constructions, including some hard cases.

Constructions are Revealed in Word Distributions

Construction grammar posits that constructions (form-meaning pairings) are acquired through experience with language (the distributional learning hypothesis). But how much information about…

arxiv.org

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Tiyash @tiyash.bsky.social · Mar 6

I am concerned about AI but late at night, alone working on a proposal, I was glad ChatGPT had my back as I hit submit 😀.. Reminded me of @chrmanning.bsky.social’s mention in a talk of the 'Real World Utility Test' - early adoption of tech moves forward when it’s genuinely useful, concerns and all.

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JHU Computer Science @jhucompsci.bsky.social · Mar 7

Upcoming joint LCSR seminar featuring @stanfordnlp.bsky.social’s @siddkaramcheti.bsky.social! Learn more about it here: www.cs.jhu.edu/event/cs-lcs...

CS & LCSR Seminar Series: Language-Driven Learning for Interactive Robotics. March 12, 2025, 12 p.m., B-17 Hackerman Hall. Siddharth Karamcheti, Stanford University.

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Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · Mar 10

An introductory talk by @chrmanning.bsky.social on “Large Language Models in 2025 – How much understanding and intelligence?” at the Workshop on a Public AI Assistant to Worldwide Knowledge at Stanford, covering 3 eras of LLMs, RAG, Agents, DeepSeek-R1, using LLMs, ….

Video: youtu.be/5Aer7MUSuSU

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Alicia DeVrio @uhleeeeeeeshuh.bsky.social · Mar 6

How can we better think and talk about human-like qualities attributed to language technologies like LLMs? In our #CHI2025 paper, we taxonomize how text outputs from cases of user interactions with language technologies can contribute to anthropomorphism. arxiv.org/abs/2502.09870 1/n

Image of the first page of the CHI 2025 paper titled "A Taxonomy of Linguistic Expressions That Contribute To Anthropomorphism of Language Technologies" by authors Alicia DeVrio, Myra Cheng, Lisa Egede, Alexandra Olteanu, & Su Lin Blodgett

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Hao Zhu 朱昊 @zhuhao.me · Mar 4

We are getting closer to have agents operating in the real physical world. However, can we trust frontier models to make embodied decisions 🎮 aligned with human norms 👩‍⚖️ ?

With EgoNormia, a 1.8k ego-centric video 🥽 QA benchmark, we show that this is surprisingly challenging!

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Caleb Ziems @calebziems.com · Mar 4

EgoNormia (egonormia.org) exposes a major gap in Vision-Language Models understanding of the social world: they don't know how to behave when norms about the physical world *conflict* ⚔️ (<45% acc.)

But humans are naturally quite good at this (>90% acc.)

Check it out!

➡️ arxiv.org/abs/2502.20490

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Kanishk Gandhi @gandhikanishk.bsky.social · Mar 4

1/13 New Paper!! We try to understand why some LMs self-improve their reasoning while others hit a wall. The key? Cognitive behaviors! Read our paper on how the right cognitive behaviors can make all the difference in a model's ability to improve with RL! 🧵

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Christopher Manning @chrmanning.bsky.social · Mar 3

In 2013, at AKBC 2013 and other workshops, I gave a talk titled “Texts are Knowledge”. This was well before there were any transformer LLMs—indeed before the invention of attention—and my early neural NLP ideas were rudimentary.

🔮 Nevertheless, the talk was quite prophetic!

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Lakshya A Agrawal @lakshyaaagrawal.bsky.social · Mar 3

🧵Introducing LangProBe: the first benchmark testing where and how composing LLMs into language programs affects cost-quality tradeoffs!

We find that, on avg across diverse tasks, smaller models within optimized programs beat calls to larger models at a fraction of the cost.

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Feb 19

Excited to have two papers at #NAACL2025!
The first reveals how human over-reliance can be exacerbated by LLM friendliness. The second presents a novel computational method for concept tracing. Check them out!

arxiv.org/pdf/2407.07950

arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05704

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Rose E Wang @rewang.bsky.social · Feb 18

Real-world AI needs real-world work. Let’s make it happen 🔥🔥

Want to learn more?
Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03017v2
Code: github.com/rosewang2008/tutor-copilot
School visit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOd2...

Thank you @nssaccelerator.bsky.social @stanfordnlp.bsky.social for the support!

arxiv.org

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Rose E Wang @rewang.bsky.social · Feb 18

AI won’t reshape education without tackling real problems. Why are we not visiting schools or talking to teachers?

A year ago, I partnered with a district facing a major challenge. Instead of doing AI x Education research in isolation, I focused on their real needs.🧵

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Jeff Dean @jeffdean.bsky.social · Jan 22

We’ve been thrilled by the positive reception to Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking we discussed in December.

Today we’re sharing an experimental update w/improved performance on math, science, and multimodal reasoning benchmarks 📈:
• AIME: 73.3%
• GPQA: 74.2%
• MMMU: 75.4%

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