Building agents @TechAtBloomberg; Previously Postdoc @jhuclsp JHU; PhD @GeorgiaTech

Joined September 2015
Accepted to #NeurIPS2026 #NeurIPS 🥳 We've added more experiments and new findings; stay tuned for the camera-ready version.
Multimodal LLMs can read text in images, but why do they often perform worse than when the same text is given as tokens? Our work studies the modality gap of models perceiving text as pixels and shows how to close it. 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2603.09095 🧵👇 #NLProc #LLM #ComputerVision
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🔥FIRE-Bench got into #ICML2026🎉 Our take on #AutoResearch: target real human-verified scientific insights, not engineered ML models Stay tuned for two follow-ups: 1️⃣ FIRE-Bench scaled into the "SWE-Bench" of research agents 2️⃣ Paper2Bench: any paper → a verifiable benchmark
🤖🔬 Can AI actually do science end-to-end? 🧠📈 And how would we know when it matches, or surpasses, humans? ⚡🧪 AI is rapidly automating scientific discovery, but benchmarking full-cycle discovery, from 💡 ideation → 🧑‍💻 execution → 📊 conclusions, remains unsolved: 🧐🧐🧐 ❌🛠️ Open-ended discovery → manual validation (costly, unscalable) ❌📏 Metric-driven benchmarks (e.g., MLE-Bench) → convenient but narrow (is higher accuracy really enough?) ❌🤖⚖️ LLM-as-judge → useful, but fundamentally risky if used alone 🔥🚀 Introducing FIRE-Bench🔥: Fullcycle Insight Rediscovery Evaluation 👉🌐 firebench.github.io 📚✨ A benchmark that turns fresh, human-verified insights from recent 🏆 NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML papers into masked, end-to-end discovery challenges 🧩 🌍🔐 Constrained open-ended discovery–backed by ground truth. 📌 Key takeaways: 1⃣ 📖🧱 Reference-based evaluation still matters: constrained LLM judging helps, but human-grounded references remain essential until agents can consistently match human conclusions 2⃣ 🏆🧠 Expert-validated ground truth: all tasks come from recent NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML papers, with contamination carefully controlled 3⃣ 🔁🎭 Rediscovery, not reproduction: original 🧪 methods, 📊 experiments, 💻 implementations, and 📈 analyses are fully masked to create real discovery challenges 🔑 Key empirical findings: 💡 The "Science Gap" is Real: Even the best setup (Claude Code + Sonnet-4) caps out at an F1 score of 46.7. On hard tasks, agents struggle to break 30 💡 Success is a "Lottery": Performance has incredibly high variance. Reliability is a major unsolved issue. 💡 Coding is no longer the bottleneck; high-level reasoning and analysis are: ~74% of errors stem from flawed planning, not coding ⚙️ How it works: 🔹 Research-Problem Trees: We parse papers into trees (from broad roots to concrete leaves). This allows us to select intermediate nodes that perfectly balance open-ended exploration with verifiable ground truth. 🔹 Claim-Level Evaluation: We match AI conclusions against human conclusions using granular claim decomposition (F1 score). 🔹 Creativity Check: We score false positives to see if agents are finding novel truths (Spoiler🚨: they aren’t creative yet). 🔹 New Diagnostic Taxonomy: failures traced across four stages: 🧠 Planning → 🛠️ Implementation → ▶️ Execution → 🧾 Conclusion 🔹 Additional Analyses: cost efficiency, contamination checks, and more. 👀 The Future: 🚀 Live-FIRE-Bench: a live, continuously updated FIRE-Bench to track real-time progress on the latest research (Newest LLMs should be benchmarked with the newest research) 🚀 Stronger scaffolding (search + planning + coding) 🧠🧰 and converting FIRE-Bench into interactive environments for training research agents 🚀 Toward real creativity: We want better systems that can produce genuinely novel conclusions toward creativity 🎨⏳ 🚀 Better systems 🧠✨ and better benchmarks 📏 must co-evolve 🔄 over time 📜🎥 Paper, video, demo, and research trees: 👉🌐 firebench.github.io #AI 🤖 #MachineLearning 📚 #AI4Science 🔬 #LLMs 🧠 #Research 🧪 #AgenticAI 🚀 #FireBench 🔥
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Love this direction from @karpathy. Autonomous agents iterating on training runs feel like a modern renaissance of AutoML, except now the search space includes research decisions themselves: architectures, training setups, analysis pipelines, etc. But if “autoresearch” becomes a thing, the obvious question is: how do we measure progress in “autoresearch”? - Paper generation, single metrics, LLM-as-judge, or traditional reproducibility research? That’s exactly the motivation behind FIRE-Bench (Full-cycle Insight Rediscovery Evaluation): xitter.cf/zhenwang9102/status/20… Instead of optimizing a single metric or judging papers, FIRE-Bench evaluates whether agents can rediscover real scientific insights from recent NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML papers: - Turn papers into research-problem trees and select a proper research problem to ask (neither too broad nor too narrow) - We mask the original methods, experiments, and conclusions - Ask agents to go from idea → implementation → experiments → conclusions - Then score them via claim-level matching against expert-validated ground truth What we found so far: - Even the strongest agents struggle (best F1 ≈ 46.7) - Performance is extremely high variance (“research lottery”) - Planning and reasoning, not coding, is the main bottleneck If autoresearch systems like this keep improving, benchmarks must evolve alongside them. Better research agents 🤖 need better ways to measure real discovery 🔬 FIRE-Bench: firebench.github.io
I packaged up the "autoresearch" project into a new self-contained minimal repo if people would like to play over the weekend. It's basically nanochat LLM training core stripped down to a single-GPU, one file version of ~630 lines of code, then: - the human iterates on the prompt (.md) - the AI agent iterates on the training code (.py) The goal is to engineer your agents to make the fastest research progress indefinitely and without any of your own involvement. In the image, every dot is a complete LLM training run that lasts exactly 5 minutes. The agent works in an autonomous loop on a git feature branch and accumulates git commits to the training script as it finds better settings (of lower validation loss by the end) of the neural network architecture, the optimizer, all the hyperparameters, etc. You can imagine comparing the research progress of different prompts, different agents, etc. github.com/karpathy/autorese… Part code, part sci-fi, and a pinch of psychosis :)
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Fan Bai retweeted
Can LLM-simulated users replace expensive human evaluation for multi-turn conversations? Short answer: yes, if you model the user right. With our SimulatorArena, we find that detailed user profiles (knowledge + message style) improve alignment with real human evaluation by 26% at <3% the cost. #EMNLP2025 [1/6] 🧵
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What happens when an LLM is asked to use information that contradicts its knowledge? We explore knowledge conflict in a new preprint📑 TLDR: Performance drops, and this could affect the overall performance of LLMs in model-based evaluation.📑🧵⬇️ 1/8 #NLProc #LLM #AIResearch
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Ever wondered if style lexicons still play a role in the era of LLMs? 🤔 We tested 13 established and 63 novel language styles across different LLMs. 🧠✨ It turns out lexicons are still crucial for style understanding! But how can we better leverage this lexical knowledge? Our approach: meta-tuning LLMs to leverage lexical knowledge for generalizable language style understanding. Check out our latest work at Main of #ACL2024NLP! 🚀 arxiv.org/abs/2305.14592 @mlatgt @ICatGT
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.@ReviewAcl Can't we just do away with this confusing intermediary (3) score for meta-reviews? Instead just have a 4 scale AE rating: 1,2,4,5 What's the diff between "major" (3) and "significant" (2) revisions anyway? It only leads to inconsistency between AEs IMO
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Fantastic research group meeting today at @JHUBloombergCtr. We then went to see the Cherry Blossoms. We also saw Stumpy!
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🧐Are LLM responses to public health questions biased toward specific demographic groups? In our new interdisciplinary collaboration, we find that disparities exist among model answers for different groups across ages, U.S. locations, and sexes. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2403.04858.pdf
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We’re pleased to announce the appointment of @mdredze as our Associate Head of Research and Strategic Initiatives! Mark will lead the dept.’s strategic growth and development plan as we launch one of the most ambitious initiatives in academic AI research. cs.jhu.edu/news/mark-dredze-…
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How do LLMs perform in realistic clinical cases? 🔥Introducing two challenging medical QA datasets with high-quality explanations 🤖GPT-4 fell short in handling these challenging tasks 🤔Model explanations are promising but challenging for evaluation 📄arxiv.org/abs/2402.18060
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🚨Summer AI Research Internships🚨 The @TechAtBloomberg office of the CTO is looking for summer AI research interns! ML, NLP, Vision, LLMs Spread the word. Interested candidates should apply here: forms.gle/niB9ZU6eEi6iEznw7
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Hi 👋, I am hiring an NLP postdoc at Georgia Tech. The general topic is language understanding for scientific literature 👩‍🔬. There is significant flexibility to shape the research direction. Feel free to reach out schedule a time to chat at ACL next week! #ACL2023NLP @mlatgt
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Intriguing question: given a fixed budget, shall you spend it on annotation, pre-training or both? Find out more: arxiv.org/pdf/2109.04711.pdf #emnlp2021 #NLProc by Fai Ban @loadingfan, @alan_ritter and @cocoweixu
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#EMNLP2021 coverage continues with @GeorgiaTech faculty sharing details about their work in the conference’s technical program. Read a 2-minute Q&A with @alan_ritter from @ICatGT. getrevue.co/profile/georgia-…
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We’re kicking off our #EMNLP2021 coverage with insights directly from some of @GeorgiaTech's Machine Learning Center faculty with research in the conference’s technical program. Read a 2-minute Q&A with @cocoweixu, asst. prof. in @ICatGT. getrevue.co/profile/georgia-…
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Join us Friday (10/1 at noon EDT) at the @GeorgiaTech #NLP seminar series where Yejin Choi (@YejinChoinka) will present "Knowledge is Power: Symbolic Knowledge Distillation, Commonsense Morality, and Multimodal Script Knowledge" sites.google.com/view/nlpsem…
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🧑‍🔬🧪We'll be presenting our work on process-level annotation+modelling of scientific procedural texts this week@ #EACL2021! Poster session 23/4 13-15 UTC, we'd love to chat :) Project page: textlabs.github.io/ Great team effort w/ @loadingfan, @alan_ritter, @GabiStanovsky! >
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We are hiring this year at @ICatGT - job ad just posted. Very happy with the environment here since recently joining. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/j…
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