Nishant Balepur

@nbalepur.bsky.social

CS PhD Student. Trying to find that dog in me at UMD. Babysitting (aligning) + Bullying (evaluating) LLMs nbalepur.github.io

🎉🎉 Excited to have two papers accepted to #ACL2025! Our first paper designs a preference training method to boost LLM personalization 🎨 While the second outlines our position on why MCQA evals are terrible and how to make them better 🙏 Grateful for amazing collaborators!

Bild

Want to know what training data has been memorized by models like GPT-4? We propose information-guided probes, a method to uncover memorization evidence in *completely black-box* models, without requiring access to 🙅‍♀️ Model weights 🙅‍♀️ Training data 🙅‍♀️ Token probabilities 🧵 (1/5)

Information-Guided Identification of Training Data Imprint in (Proprietary) Large Language Models

High-quality training data has proven crucial for developing performant large language models (LLMs). However, commercial LLM providers disclose few, if any, details about the data used for training. ...

arxiv.org

Finally may have figured out why LLMs rhyme so compulsively: instruction-tuning. Training an LLM to respond "helpfully" to user queries may push models into more "pleasing" aesthetic forms.

Graph showing that simple text completion models more accurately imitate the unrhymed form of C20 verse, whereas instruction-tuned models lapse into rhyme more often. 

Caption to graph: Given the first 5 lines of 10-20 line poems from poets born in each century, 1600-2000, LLMs are prompted to "complete" the poem. Rhyme is measured by exact phoneme match in the rime of the final syllable (or syllables, if final syllable unstressed). Poems randomly sampled from Chadwyck-Healey poetry collections, with 600 poems for each model for each century. Results shown for actual poems as well as the LLM imitations. Poems "memorized" by the model are excluded.

🚨 New Position Paper 🚨 Multiple choice evals for LLMs are simple and popular, but we know they are awful 😬 We complain they're full of errors, saturated, and test nothing meaningful, so why do we still use them? 🫠 Here's why MCQA evals are broken, and how to fix them 🧵

Bild

⚠️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.

Bild

🚨 New Position Paper 🚨 Multiple choice evals for LLMs are simple and popular, but we know they are awful 😬 We complain they're full of errors, saturated, and test nothing meaningful, so why do we still use them? 🫠 Here's why MCQA evals are broken, and how to fix them 🧵

Bild

Excited to share 2 papers at #NAACL2025 main! 📄✍️ MoDS: Multi-Doc Summarization for Debatable Queries (Adobe intern work, coming soon!) 🤔❓Reverse QA: LLMs struggle with the simple task of giving questions for answers Grateful for all my collaborators 😁

Bild

People often claim they know when ChatGPT wrote something, but are they as accurate as they think? Turns out that while general population is unreliable, those who frequently use ChatGPT for writing tasks can spot even "humanized" AI-generated text with near-perfect accuracy 🎯

Bild