Gosh, I’m getting way too emotional writing my thesis acknowledgements...

Will be at #NeurIPS2025 (San Diego) Dec 1-9, then in the Bay Area until the 14th. Hmu if you wanna grab coffee and talk about totally random stuff.

Thread with a few things I’m excited about.
P.S. 4 NeurIPS papers all started pre-May 2024 and took ~1 year of polishing...so proud of the team!

Unfortunately, I’ll be missing #ACL2025NLP this year — but here are a few things I’m excited about! 👇

📣 Excited to announce SpaVLE: #NeurIPS2025 Workshop on Space in Vision, Language, and Embodied AI!

Join us in San Diego to push the frontiers of spatial understanding and reasoning across CV, NLP, and robotics!

👉 space-in-vision-language-embodied-ai.github.io

At Albuquerque Now :)

Vision-Language Models are not yet pragmatically optimal.

We identify 3 key failures of pragmatic competence in referring expression generation with VLMs: (1) cannot uniquely refer to the referent, (2) include excessive or irrelevant information, and (3) misalign with human pragmatic preferences.

I won’t be attending #ICLR2025 in person since #NAACL2025 follows right after, but here are a few things I’m excited about (all time in EDT) ⬇️

#ICLR2025 and #CHI2025 are just around the corner!

We warmly invite you to join us at our ICLR Workshop and CHI SIG on Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment (Bi-Align), a space for rigorous and reflective conversations of alignment research.