Manya Wadhwa

@manyawadhwa.bsky.social

PhD at UTCS | #NLP https://manyawadhwa.github.io/

Would you realize if the book you were reading was AI? What if it was humanized to remove AI-speak? We find that even without using stylistic cues (e.g., word choice or sentence structure) narrative choices alone give AI fiction away!

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⚛️ Introducing CREATE, a benchmark for creative associative reasoning in LLMs. Making novel, meaningful connections is key for scientific & creative works. We objectively measure how well LLMs can do this. 🧵👇

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Hello world 👋 My first paper at UT Austin! We ask: what happens when medical “evidence” fed into an LLM is wrong? Should your AI stay faithful, or should it play it safe when the evidence is harmful? We show that frontier LLMs accept counterfactual medical evidence at face value.🧵

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N-gram novelty is widely used as a measure of creativity and generalization. But if LLMs produce highly n-gram novel expressions that don’t make sense or sound awkward, should they still be called creative? In a new paper, we investigate how n-gram novelty relates to creativity.

N-gram novelty is widely used to evaluate language models' ability to generate text outside of their training data. More recently, it has also been adopted as a metric for measuring textual creativity. However, theoretical work on creativity suggests that this approach may be inadequate, as it does not account for creativity's dual nature: novelty (how original the text is) and appropriateness (how sensical and pragmatic it is). We investigate the relationship between this notion of creativity and n-gram novelty through 7542 expert writer annotations (n=26) of novelty, pragmaticality, and sensicality via close reading of human and AI-generated text. We find that while n-gram novelty is positively associated with expert writer-judged creativity, ~91% of top-quartile expressions by n-gram novelty are not judged as creative, cautioning against relying on n-gram novelty alone. Furthermore, unlike human-written text, higher n-gram novelty in open-source LLMs correlates with lower pragmaticality. In an exploratory study with frontier close-source models, we additionally confirm that they are less likely to produce creative expressions than humans. Using our dataset, we test whether zero-shot, few-shot, and finetuned models are able to identify creative expressions (a positive aspect of writing) and non-pragmatic ones (a negative aspect). Overall, frontier LLMs exhibit performance much higher than random but leave room for improvement, especially struggling to identify non-pragmatic expressions. We further find that LLM-as-a-Judge novelty scores from the best-performing model were predictive of expert writer preferences.

AI is already at work in American newsrooms. We examine 186k articles published this summer and find that ~9% are either fully or partially AI-generated, usually without readers having any idea. Here's what we learned about how AI is influencing local and national journalism:

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Unfortunately I won't be at #COLM2025 this week, but please check out our work being presented by my collaborators/advisors! If you are interested in evals of open-ended tasks/creativity please reach out and we can schedule a chat! :)

Greg Durrett@gregdnlp.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Find my students and collaborators at COLM this week! Tuesday morning: @juand-r.bsky.social and @ramyanamuduri.bsky.social 's papers (find them if you missed it!) Wednesday pm: @manyawadhwa.bsky.social 's EvalAgent Thursday am: @anirudhkhatry.bsky.social 's CRUST-Bench oral spotlight + poster

Ever wondered what makes language models generate overly verbose, vague, or sycophantic responses? Our new paper investigates these and other idiosyncratic biases in preference models, and presents a simple post-training recipe to mitigate them! Thread below 🧵↓

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🚀Meet CRUST-Bench, a dataset for C-to-Rust transpilation for full codebases 🛠️ A dataset of 100 real-world C repositories across various domains, each paired with: 🦀 Handwritten safe Rust interfaces. 🧪 Rust test cases to validate correctness. 🧵[1/6]

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Evaluating language model responses on open-ended tasks is hard! 🤔 We introduce EvalAgent, a framework that identifies nuanced and diverse criteria 📋✍️. EvalAgent identifies 👩‍🏫🎓 expert advice on the web that implicitly address the user’s prompt 🧵👇

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One of the ways that LLMs can be inconsistent is the "generator-validator gap," where LLMs deem their own answers incorrect. 🎯 We demonstrate that ranking-based discriminator training can significantly reduce this gap, and improvements on one task often generalize to others! 🧵👇

A visualization of the generator-validator gap, where the LM likelihoods of for the generator and discriminator forms of questions are poorly correlated.Aligning the validator and generator rankings can fix it!

Do you want to know what information LLMs prioritize in text synthesis tasks? Here's a short 🧵 about our new paper, led by Jan Trienes: an interpretable framework for salience analysis in LLMs. First of all, information salience is a fuzzy concept. So how can we even measure it? (1/6)

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⚠️Current methods for generating instruction-following data fall short for long-range reasoning tasks like narrative claim verification. We present CLIPPER ✂️, a compression-based pipeline that produces grounded instructions for ~$0.5 each, 34x cheaper than human annotations.

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I've spent the last two years scouring all available resources on RLHF specifically and post training broadly. Today, with the help of a totally cracked team, we bring you the fruits of that labor — Tülu 3, an entirely open frontier model post training recipe. We beat Llama 3.1 Instruct. Thread.

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