Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Jul 15

🎉 Congrats @peterbhase.bsky.social + best wishes for the @schmidtsciences.bsky.social scientist + @stanfordnlp.bsky.social visiting researcher roles! 🙂

Looking forward to your continued exciting research contributions in AI safety & interpretability, and your new grant-making contributions 🔥

2

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Peter Hase @peterbhase.bsky.social · Jul 14

Overdue job update — I am now:
- A Visiting Scientist at @schmidtsciences.bsky.social, supporting AI safety & interpretability
- A Visiting Researcher at Stanford NLP Group, working with @cgpotts.bsky.social

So grateful to keep working in this fascinating area—and to start supporting others too :)

3 1 5

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

AthNLP - Athens Natural Language Processing Summer School @athnlp.bsky.social · Jun 27

📢 Speakers Announcement #AthNLP2025
We’re thrilled to welcome a new lineup of brilliant minds to the ATHNLP stage!🚀
Meet our new NLP speakers shaping the future.
📅 Dates: 4-10 September 2025 athnlp.github.io/2025/speaker...
#ATHNLP #NLP #AI #MachineLearning #Athens

1 1 7

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Andreas Vlachos @andreasvlachos.bsky.social · Jun 6

Looking forward to this year's edition! With great speakers: Ryan McDonald Yulan He @vn-ml.bsky.social @antonisa.bsky.social Raquel Fernandez @annarogers.bsky.social Preslav Nakov @mohitbansal.bsky.social @eunsol.bsky.social Marie-Catherine de Marnefffe !

AthNLP - Athens Natural Language Processing Summer School @athnlp.bsky.social · Jun 6

📢 10 Days Left to apply for the AthNLP - Athens Natural Language Processing Summer School!
✍ Get your applications in before June 15th!
athnlp.github.io/2025/cfp.html

3 6

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · May 21

the journey has been a great pleasure for me too @jmincho.bsky.social 🤗, and looking forward to your exciting work in the future! 💙

1

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · May 20

🔥 Huge CONGRATS to Jaemin + @jhucompsci.bsky.social! 🎉

Very proud of his journey as an amazing researcher (covering groundbreaking, foundational research on important aspects of multimodality+other areas) & as an awesome, selfless mentor/teamplayer 💙
-- Apply to his group & grab him for gap year!

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! 🔎

1 1 6

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

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

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · May 6

aww thanks for the kind words @esteng.bsky.social -- completely my pleasure 🤗💙

1

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · May 5

🔥 BIG CONGRATS to Elias (and UT Austin)! Really proud of you -- it has been a complete pleasure to work with Elias and see him grow into a strong PI on *all* axes 🤗

Make sure to apply for your PhD with him -- he is an amazing advisor and person! 💙

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! 🎉

1 4 11

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

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

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

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 Mohit Bansal

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Apr 29

✈️ 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!

1 5 15

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Apr 24

Check out 🚨CAPTURe🚨 -- a new benchmark testing spatial reasoning by making VLMs count objects under occlusion.

SOTA VLMs (GPT-4o, Qwen2-VL, Intern-VL2) have high error rates on CAPTURe (but humans have low error ✅) and models struggle to reason about occluded objects.

arxiv.org/abs/2504.15485

🧵👇

1 4 5

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Apr 21

PS. and here are the presentation time slots/details of all the
@iclr-conf.bsky.social and @tmlrorg.bsky.social papers 👇

2

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Apr 21

In Singapore for #ICLR2025 this week to present papers + keynotes 👇, and looking forward to seeing everyone -- happy to chat about research, or faculty+postdoc+phd positions, or simply hanging out (feel free to ping)! 🙂

Also meet our awesome students/postdocs/collaborators presenting their work.

1 4 19

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Archiki Prasad @archiki.bsky.social · Apr 18

🚨Real-world retrieval is messy: queries are ambiguous or docs conflict & have incorrect/irrelevant info. How can we jointly address these problems?

➡️RAMDocs: challenging dataset w/ ambiguity, misinformation & noise
➡️MADAM-RAG: multi-agent framework, debates & aggregates evidence across sources

🧵⬇️

3 7 14

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

hanqix.bsky.social @hanqix.bsky.social · Apr 16

Excited to share my first paper as first author: "Task-Circuit Quantization" 🎉
I led this work to explore how interpretability insights can drive smarter model compression. Big thank you to @esteng.bsky.social, Yi-Lin Sung, and @mohitbansal.bsky.social for mentorship and collaboration. More to come

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Apr 12

🚨Announcing TaCQ 🚨 a new mixed-precision quantization method that identifies critical weights to preserve. We integrate key ideas from circuit discovery, model editing, and input attribution to improve low-bit quant., w/ 96% 16-bit acc. at 3.1 avg bits (~6x compression)

📃 arxiv.org/abs/2504.07389

2 5

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Zaid Khan @codezakh.bsky.social · Apr 15

What if we could transform advanced math problems into abstract programs that can generate endless, verifiable problem variants?

Presenting EFAGen, which automatically transforms static advanced math problems into their corresponding executable functional abstractions (EFAs).
🧵👇

1 5 15

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Apr 12

🚨Announcing TaCQ 🚨 a new mixed-precision quantization method that identifies critical weights to preserve. We integrate key ideas from circuit discovery, model editing, and input attribution to improve low-bit quant., w/ 96% 16-bit acc. at 3.1 avg bits (~6x compression)

📃 arxiv.org/abs/2504.07389

1 7 15

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Vaidehi Patil @vaidehipatil.bsky.social · Apr 2

🚨Exciting @icmlconf.bsky.social workshop alert 🚨

We’re thrilled to announce the #ICML2025 Workshop on Machine Unlearning for Generative AI (MUGen)!

⚡Join us in Vancouver this July to dive into cutting-edge research on unlearning in generative AI with top speakers and panelists! ⚡

1 1 4

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Mar 27

machinelearning.apple.com/updates/appl...

archiki.github.io

Announcing the 2025 Apple Scholars in AIML

Apple is proud to announce the 2025 recipients of the Apple Scholars in AIML PhD fellowship.

machinelearning.apple.com

Mohit Bansal @mohitbansal.bsky.social · Mar 27

🎉🎉 Big congrats to @archiki.bsky.social on being awarded the @Apple AI/ML PhD Fellowship, for her extensive contributions in evaluating+improving reasoning in language/reward models and their applications to new domains (ReCEval, RepARe, System-1.x, ADaPT, ReGAL, ScPO, UTGen, GrIPS)! #ProudAdvisor

Archiki Prasad @archiki.bsky.social · Mar 27

🥳🥳 Honored and grateful to be awarded the 2025 Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD Fellowship! ✨

Huge shoutout to my advisor @mohitbansal.bsky.social, & many thanks to my lab mates @unccs.bsky.social , past collaborators + internship advisors for their support ☺️🙏

machinelearning.apple.com/updates/appl...

1 1 3

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Rada Mihalcea @radamihalcea.bsky.social · Mar 12

We had a blast at the NLP@Michigan Day! Many thanks to our outstanding keynote speakers Parisa Kordjamshidi & @mohitbansal.bsky.social, our fantastic organizers Muhammad Khalifa & Siyang Liu, and all the engaged participants from across campus and beyond. So much positive NLP energy! 💛💙

1 7

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Elias Stengel-Eskin @esteng.bsky.social · Feb 25

🚨UPCORE is our new method for balancing unlearning/forgetting with maintaining model performance.

Best part is it works by selecting a coreset from the data rather than changing the model, so it is compatible with any unlearning method, with consistent gains for 3 methods + 2 tasks!

Vaidehi Patil @vaidehipatil.bsky.social · Feb 25

🚨 Introducing UPCORE, to balance deleting info from LLMs with keeping their other capabilities intact.

UPCORE selects a coreset of forget data, leading to a better trade-off across 2 datasets and 3 unlearning methods.

🧵👇

2 4

Reposted by Mohit Bansal

Vaidehi Patil @vaidehipatil.bsky.social · Feb 25

🚨 Introducing UPCORE, to balance deleting info from LLMs with keeping their other capabilities intact.

UPCORE selects a coreset of forget data, leading to a better trade-off across 2 datasets and 3 unlearning methods.

🧵👇

2 5 12