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 :)
Mohit Bansal
@mohitbansal.bsky.social
Parker Distinguished Professor, @UNC. Program Chair #EMNLP2024. Director http://MURGeLab.cs.unc.edu (@uncnlp). @Berkeley_AI @TTIC_Connect @IITKanpur #NLP #CV #AI #ML https://www.cs.unc.edu/~mbansal/
📢 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
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 !
📢 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
🔥 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! 🎉
🌵 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
🎉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
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!
🚨 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)!
✈️ 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 🧵⬇️
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
🚨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
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). 🧵👇
🚨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
🚨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! ⚡
🎉🎉 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
🥳🥳 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...
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! 💛💙
🚨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!
🚨 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. 🧵👇
🚨 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 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: 🧵👇
🚨 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: 🧵👇
🚨 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: 🧵👇
🎉 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 💙
🎉 Congratulations to Prof. @mohitbansal.bsky.social for receiving the Presidential #PECASE Award by @WhiteHouse, which is the highest honor bestowed by US govt. on outstanding scientists/engineers who show exceptional potential for leadership early in their careers! whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-up...
✨ Collaborating with our amazing postdocs in our lab over the past year has been a great learning experience, with lots of fun + exciting research in LLM agents, reasoning, & multimodality! Check out the new postdoc openings and become a part of the vibrant research @unccs.bsky.social !⬇️
🚨 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 🙏
Check out our postdoc openings at UNC-CH! In addition to the valuable research opportunities, please also note that Chapel Hill and the research triangle are great places to live, with nice weather, food, and people! I truly have enjoyed living here 😊
🚨 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 🙏
Apply soon to - work with tons of extremely talented and strong students and get hands-on experience mentoring - benefit from expert mentorship - be in a great department and live in an area with high quality of life and more! Feel free to ping me if you want to hear more from a current postdoc!
🚨 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 🙏