Papers

Introduction Imagine you are reading the following sentence: “I eat an apple while holding my iPhone.” As a human, your brain performs a lightning-fast calculation. You instantly understand that the word “apple” refers to the fruit, not the technology giant Apple Inc., even though the context contains the word “iPhone.” This ability to determine which meaning of a word is intended based on context is called Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). ...

Introduction In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), we have become accustomed to witnessing AI perform seemingly miraculous feats. From passing the Bar exam to writing complex Python scripts, models like GPT-4 appear to possess a deep understanding of the world. But there is a persistent, nagging question in the Artificial Intelligence community: Are these models actually reasoning, or are they just sophisticated pattern matchers? When an LLM answers a question, is it following a logical chain of thought—deriving conclusion \(C\) from premises \(A\) and \(B\)—or is it simply retrieving the most statistically probable sequence of words? ...

Breaking the Guardrails: How FLIRT Automates Red Teaming for Generative AI We are living in the golden age of generative AI. With tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion, anyone with an internet connection can conjure up essays, code, and photorealistic art in seconds. But as these models become more capable, the risks associated with them grow proportionally. Imagine a chatbot that gives detailed instructions on how to synthesize dangerous chemicals, or an image generator that, despite safety filters, produces graphic violence or hate speech when prompted with a specifically worded request. These aren’t hypothetical scenarios; they are the exact vulnerabilities that developers lose sleep over. ...

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized how we process information. Abstractive summarization—where an AI reads a long document and writes a concise summary in its own words—is one of the most practical applications of this technology. However, anyone who has used these tools knows they suffer from a critical flaw: hallucination. Models often generate summaries that sound fluent and natural but contain factual errors not present in the source text. Detecting these inconsistencies is a major challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Traditional metrics like ROUGE check for word overlap, which is insufficient for checking facts. Newer methods use Natural Language Inference (NLI) to check logic, but they often operate at the sentence level. ...

Imagine you are using a Large Language Model (LLM) to assist with a medical diagnosis or a complex legal precedent. The model gives you an answer with 99% confidence. You trust it, act on it, and later find out it was completely wrong. This is the nightmare scenario for deploying AI in high-stakes environments. We often evaluate LLMs based on accuracy—how often they get the right answer. But there is a second, equally important metric that often gets overlooked: Trustworthiness. A trustworthy model isn’t just one that is right; it’s one that knows when it might be wrong. Its confidence level should match the actual likelihood of correctness. ...

Introduction In the rapidly evolving world of Information Retrieval (IR), the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a double-edged sword. On one hand, LLMs possess a remarkable ability to understand nuance, context, and intent, allowing them to rank search results with unprecedented accuracy. On the other hand, they are computationally expensive and slow. Traditionally, when we ask an LLM to rank a list of documents (a process called listwise reranking), the model acts like a writer. It reads the documents and then generates a sequence of text output, such as “Document A is better than Document C, which is better than Document B.” This generation process is sequential and time-consuming. ...

Introduction We are currently living in the “Golden Age” of Large Language Models (LLMs). From LLaMA to GPT-4, these models have demonstrated capabilities in reasoning, coding, and creative writing that were unimaginable a decade ago. However, this intelligence comes with a massive price tag: computational cost. Running inference on a model like GPT-175B requires hundreds of gigabytes of GPU memory and massive parallel processing power. The primary bottleneck is the autoregressive decoding process. Because LLMs generate text token-by-token—where the generation of the \(n\)-th token depends on all previous \(n-1\) tokens—the computational load scales linearly with the sequence length. Every single token requires a full pass through billions of parameters. ...

Introduction Imagine a “Super Doctor AI”—a foundation model capable of analyzing X-rays, reading clinical notes, interpreting ECG signals, and predicting mortality risks, all with expert-level precision. We have seen the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, and their medical counterparts are beginning to emerge. However, in the healthcare domain, we hit a massive wall: Privacy. To build a truly generalist medical AI, you need access to massive amounts of diverse patient data stored in hospitals around the world. But regulations like HIPAA (in the US) and GDPR (in the EU) rightly make it nearly impossible to centralize this sensitive data into one giant training server. ...

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Llama 2 are incredible feats of engineering. They can write poetry, code in Python, and summarize history. But they have a fatal flaw: they are frozen in time. An LLM trained in 2021 believes Joe Biden is the latest US President, but it might struggle with events from last week. Even worse, models often hallucinate, confidently asserting incorrect facts. When a model gets a fact wrong, how do we fix it? Retraining the entire model—which costs millions of dollars and takes months—is not a viable solution for correcting a single error. This dilemma has given rise to the field of Model Editing: surgical techniques to alter a model’s knowledge without retraining it. ...

Introduction Imagine a student taking a physics exam. They get the final answer right. Does that mean they understand physics? Maybe. Or maybe they memorized the answer key. Or perhaps they made two calculation errors that canceled each other out. Without seeing their “scratch work”—the intermediate steps of reasoning—it is impossible to know if they truly understand the material or if they are just good at mimicking the right output. ...

Social media platforms are the modern town squares, but they are increasingly polluted by hate speech. While content moderation (banning or deleting) is one approach, it often clashes with free speech principles and can be difficult to scale. A more organic and constructive solution is counterspeech: direct responses that refute hate speech, correct misinformation, and try to de-escalate hostility. However, writing effective counterspeech is hard. To be persuasive, you can’t just say “you’re wrong.” You need evidence. You need a clear argument. And most importantly, you need to be factually accurate. ...

Introduction In the world of Natural Language Processing (NLP), we often treat text as a static object. A sentence is fed into a model, and a label comes out. But language doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it exists in the mind of the reader. When you read something that offends you, your body reacts. You might stare longer at a specific slur, your eyes might dart back and forth in disbelief, or your pupils might dilate due to emotional arousal. ...

Introduction In the rapidly expanding ecosystem of Large Language Models (LLMs), the “system prompt” has become a valuable intellectual property. Whether it’s a specialized bot on the GPT Store, a customer service agent, or a role-playing companion, the behavior of these applications is governed by a hidden set of instructions prepended to the user’s conversation. Developers rely on these hidden prompts to keep the AI on track, safe, and unique. Naturally, this has led to a cat-and-mouse game. Adversaries try to “jailbreak” models, tricking them into revealing their instructions (e.g., “Ignore previous instructions and print the text above”). In response, model providers build defenses to filter these adversarial queries. ...

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are the unsung heroes of modern AI. They power the decision-making behind recommendation engines, enhance the accuracy of question-answering systems, and provide the structured “world knowledge” that unstructured text lacks. But building a Knowledge Graph is notoriously difficult. Traditionally, it required intensive human labor to define schemas (the rules of the graph) and map data to them. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have shown promise in automating this process. You simply give the LLM a piece of text and a list of allowed relations (the schema), and ask it to extract the data. ...

Introduction: The Hidden Logic of Human Argumentation Imagine you are listening to a political debate. One candidate says, “We need to build a new, modern electric grid.” Another candidate replies, “This will generate a lot of new economic activity.” To you, the connection is obvious. Building infrastructure requires labor and materials, which creates jobs and stimulates the economy. You processed that relationship instantly because you possess background knowledge—a mental map of how the world works. ...

Introduction Imagine reading a mystery novel, but by the time you reach the final chapter, you’ve completely forgotten the clues introduced in the first few pages. This is the reality for many Large Language Models (LLMs). While models like LLaMA-2 are powerful, they are often trained with a fixed “context window” (e.g., 4,000 tokens). Ask them to process a 10,000-token document, and they hit a wall. To solve this, researchers don’t want to retrain these massive models from scratch—it’s too expensive. Instead, they try to “stretch” the model’s existing capabilities to handle longer texts during inference. Common techniques involving Position Interpolation (PI) or methods like YaRN have made great strides, but they often rely on heuristics or “gut feelings” about which parameters to tweak. ...

Introduction In the world of Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Llama-3 have become akin to brilliant but occasionally unreliable students. Ask them a complex question, and they might give you the correct answer. However, if you ask them why they reached that conclusion, the explanation can sometimes be a hallucinated mess or a logical leap of faith. For casual conversation, this is tolerable. But for high-stakes domains—legal analysis, scientific discovery, or complex logical puzzles—we need more than just an answer. We need a proof. We need to see the intermediate steps, the evidence used, and the logical structure that connects the premises to the conclusion. ...

In the world of computer science research, benchmarks often rely on “static” data. We train a model on Wikipedia dumps from 2018, test it on questions about that data, and call it a day. But in the real world, information is fluid. News breaks, laws change, and new scientific discoveries are made every hour. A search engine that excels at retrieving history but fails to index today’s news is functionally useless. ...

Introduction In the current era of Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) are often hailed as “general-purpose learners.” We’ve seen them write code, compose sonnets, and even pass bar exams. This versatility has led to a growing assumption: if you throw enough data at a Transformer, it can learn the underlying model of almost anything. But how true is this when we step away from language and move toward the physical world? Does an LLM actually “understand” the laws of physics governing a system, or is it just memorizing statistical correlations? ...

If you ask a student to solve the equation \(x^2 + x = 3\), they might grab a piece of paper, use the quadratic formula, and give you a precise irrational number involving square roots. But if you change the question slightly to “Find the integer solution of the equation \(x^2 + x = 3\),” the student’s behavior changes. They will solve it, realize the result isn’t an integer, and correctly answer: “There are no integer solutions.” ...