How and when should LLM guardrails be deployed to balance safety and user experience? Our #EMNLP2025 paper reveals that crafting thoughtful refusals rather than detecting intent is the key to human-centered AI safety. 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2506.00195 🧵[1/9]

📣📣 Announcing the first PersonaLLM Workshop on LLM Persona Modeling. If you work on persona driven LLMs, social cognition, HCI, psychology, cognitive science, cultural modeling, or evaluation, do not miss the chance to submit. Submit here: openreview.net/group?id=Neu...

I’m ✨ super excited and grateful ✨to announce that I'm part of the 2025 class of #PackardFellows (www.packard.org/2025fellows). The @packardfdn.bsky.social and this fellowship will allow me to explore exciting research directions towards culturally responsible and safe AI 🌍🌈

🚨New paper: Reward Models (RMs) are used to align LLMs, but can they be steered toward user-specific value/style preferences? With EVALUESTEER, we find even the best RMs we tested exhibit their own value/style biases, and are unable to align with a user >25% of the time. 🧵

Saplings take #COLM2025! Featuring Group lunch, amazing posters, and a panel with Yoshua Bengio!

We are launching our Graduate School Application Financial Aid Program (www.queerinai.com/grad-app-aid) for 2025-2026. We’ll give up to $750 per person to LGBTQIA+ STEM scholars applying to graduate programs. Apply at openreview.net/group?id=Que.... 1/5

I'm also giving a talk at #COLM2025 Social Simulation workshop (sites.google.com/view/social-...) on Unlocking Social Intelligence in AI, at 2:30pm Oct 10th!

Headed to #COLM2025 today! Here's five of our papers that were accepted, and when & where to catch them 👇

📢 New #COLM2025 paper 📢 Standard benchmarks give every LLM the same questions. This is like testing 5th graders and college seniors with *one* exam! 🥴 Meet Fluid Benchmarking, a capability-adaptive eval method delivering lower variance, higher validity, and reduced cost. 🧵

That's a lot of people! Fall Sapling lab outing, welcoming our new postdoc Vasudha, and visitors Tze Hong and Chani! (just missing Jocelyn)

I'm excited cause I'm teaching/coordinating a new unique class, where we teach new PhD students all the "soft" skills of research, incl. ideation, reviewing, presenting, interviewing, advising, etc. Each lecture is taught by a different LTI prof! It takes a village! maartensap.com/11705/Fall20...

I spoke to Forbes about why model "welfare" is a silly framing to an important issue; models don't have feelings, and it's a big distraction from real questions like tensions between safety vs. user utility, which are NLP/HCI/policy questions www.forbes.com/sites/victor...

Super super excited about this :D :D

Hand gestures are a major mode of human communication, but they don't always translate well across cultures. New research from @akhilayerukola.bsky.social, @maartensap.bsky.social and others is aimed at giving AI systems a hand with overcoming cultural biases: lti.cmu.edu/news-and-eve...

New research from LTI, UMich, & Allen Institute for AI: LLMs don’t just hallucinate – sometimes, they lie. When truthfulness clashes with utility (pleasing users, boosting brands), models often mislead. @nlpxuhui.bsky.social and @maartensap.bsky.social discuss the paper: lti.cmu.edu/news-and-eve...

What if AI played the role of your sassy gay bestie 🏳️‍🌈 or AAVE-speaking friend 👋🏾? You: “Can you plan a trip?” 🤖 AI: “Yasss queen! let’s werk this babe✨💅” LLMs can talk like us, but it shapes how we trust, rely on & relate to them 🧵 📣 our #FAccT2025 paper: bit.ly/3HJ6rWI [1/9]

📣 Super excited to organize the first workshop on ✨NLP for Democracy✨ at COLM @colmweb.org!! Check out our website: sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e... Call for submissions (extended abstracts) due June 19, 11:59pm AoE #COLM2025 #LLMs #NLP #NLProc #ComputationalSocialScience

Notice our new look? We're thrilled to unveil our new logo – representing our vision, values, and the future ahead. Stay tuned for more!

super excited about this 🥰🥰

When interacting with ChatGPT, have you wondered if they would ever "lie" to you? We found that under pressure, LLMs often choose deception. Our new #NAACL2025 paper, "AI-LIEDAR ," reveals models were truthful less than 50% of the time when faced with utility-truthfulness conflicts! 🤯 1/

1/🚨 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗽𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘁 🚨 RAG systems excel on academic benchmarks - but are they robust to variations in linguistic style? We find RAG systems are brittle. Small shifts in phrasing trigger cascading errors, driven by the complexity of the RAG pipeline 🧵

RLHF is built upon some quite oversimplistic assumptions, i.e., that preferences between pairs of text are purely about quality. But this is an inherently subjective task (not unlike toxicity annotation) -- so we wanted to know, do biases similar to toxicity annotation emerge in reward models?

My PhD student Akhila's been doing some incredible cultural work in the last few years! Check out out latest work on cultural safety and hand gestures, showing most vision and/or language AI systems are very cross-culturally unsafe!

Super excited to unveil this work! LLMs need to ask better questions, and our method with synthetic data corruption can help generalize to other interesting LLM improvements (more to come on that ;) )

LLM agents can code—but can they ask clarifying questions? 🤖💬 Tired of coding agents wasting time and API credits, only to output broken code? What if they asked first instead of guessing? 🚀 (New work led by Sanidhya Vijay: www.linkedin.com/in/sanidhya-...)

Saplings Raclette night was a success 🥰

CMU LTI is hosting predoc interns this summer, centered around "Language Technologies for All"! Please apply and circulate! lti.cs.cmu.edu/news-and-eve...

Headed to #TayNeurIPS in Vancouver! Message me on Whova if you're going and wanna meet up! #Neurips #Neurips2024

Looking for all your LTI friends on Bluesky? The LTI Starter Pack is here to help! go.bsky.app/NhTwCVb

Maria is an incredible researcher and mentor! I highly encourage applying!!

A starter pack for researchers that are interested in #ToM #theory-of-mind and #Pragmatics #NLP #NLProc go.bsky.app/P6gL8vL

I heard this opinion a bunch through the conference but #EMNLP2024 was really good vibes! Congrats to the organizers 😁👏

Also, I'll be giving a talk on "Computational Methods of Social Causes and Effects of Stories" at the workshop on Narrative understanding on Nov 15th #emnlp2024 Excited to share some recent work with my students Joel & Jocelyn and collaborators @mariaa.bsky.social @andrewpiper.bsky.social!

Excited to attend EMNLP 2024 next week! A couple of my students are presenting their work!