🔥 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!

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! 🔎

🚨 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.

🔥 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! 💙

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

✈️ 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!

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 🧵👇

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.

🚨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 🧵⬇️

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). 🧵👇

🥳🥳 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...

🚨 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. 🧵👇

🚨 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

🚨 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! 🧵👇

🚨 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: 🧵👇

-- positional bias of faithfulness for long-form summarization -- improving generation faithfulness via multi-agent collaboration (PS. Also a big thanks to ACs+reviewers for their effort!)

-- safe T2I/T2V gener -- generative infinite games -- procedural+predictive video repres learning -- bootstrapping VLN via self-refining data flywheel -- automated preference data synthesis -- diagnosing cultural bias of VLMs -- adaptive decoding to balance contextual+parametric knowl conflicts 🧵

-- adapting diverse ctrls to any diffusion model -- balancing fast+slow sys-1.x planning -- balancing agents' persuasion resistance+acceptance -- multimodal compositional+modular video reasoning -- reverse thinking for stronger LLM reasoning -- lifelong multimodal instruc tuning via dyn data selec 🧵

🎉 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 ... 🧵

🎉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

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...

🎉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...

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 💙

🚨 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 🙏

✈️ I've landed in Vancouver for #NeurIPS2024 11/12: LACIE, a pragmatic speaker-listener method for training LLMs to express calibrated confidence: arxiv.org/abs/2405.21028 12/12: GTBench, a benchmark for game-theoretic abilities in LLMs: arxiv.org/abs/2402.12348 P.s. I'm on the faculty market👇

🚨 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)! 👇🧵

🚨 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 🧵👇

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" ➡️➡️ 🧵👇

🚨 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)!