NLP reviews suck! But why is not clear– @aclrollingreview.bsky.social provides *a lot* of guidance for how to review, but in that, first principles get lost. So @adamlopez.bsky.social and I have written down some of our thoughts on first principles.

The Missing First Principles of Reviewing for ACL

Zeerak Talat & Adam Lopez, University of Edinburgh

medium.com

Are you interested in interning with me and my lab? A unique opportunity for a 4-month research stay, with generous funding as an Azrieli visiting PhD fellow! DM me if you're interested. azrielifoundation.org/fellows/visi...

Excited to have the Big Picture workshop back for another iteration this year at @aclmeeting.bsky.social Submit your big picture ideas, consolidation work, phd thesis distillation, etc. by March 5th! www.bigpictureworkshop.com w/ Allyson Ettinger, @norakassner.bsky.social, @sebruder.bsky.social

Job application process in 2026: Applicant: I have written 3 papers Interviewer: where? Applicant: arXiv Interviewer: hired!

Ondra Platek@oplatek.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Interesting did not know that arxiv requires peer-reviewed papers arxiv.org/abs/2601.17036

CS ArXiv recently banned “review and position” papers, but what are those? Do they include more generated content? Who is most affected by this change? @yanai.bsky.social and I dug into the data to find out! Nearly 50% of Computers & Society papers might be censored, vs 3% of Computer Vision ‼️

Yanai Elazar@yanai.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🚨 New Study 🚨 @arxiv.bsky.social has recently decided to prohibit any 'position' paper from being submitted to its CS servers. Why? Because of the "AI slop", and allegedly higher ratios of LLM-generated content in review papers, compared to non-review papers.

🚨 New Study 🚨 @arxiv.bsky.social has recently decided to prohibit any 'position' paper from being submitted to its CS servers. Why? Because of the "AI slop", and allegedly higher ratios of LLM-generated content in review papers, compared to non-review papers.

I think I'm in a secret competition with my co-author about who uses more footnotes in the paper.

Any good tutorials/guides on how to code with LLMs? What I found so far targeted folks who don't know what they are, mostly setting expectations and saying what LLMs can or cannot do. I'm beyond that. I'm looking for best practices. Kind of design patterns for vibe coding.

Interested in interpretability, data attribution, evaluation, and similar topics? Interested in doing a postdoc with me? Apply to the prestigious Azrieli program! Link below 👇 DMs are open (email is good too!)

You had one job!

"AI slop" seems to be everywhere, but what exactly makes text feel like "slop"? In our new work (w/ @tuhinchakr.bsky.social, Diego Garcia-Olano, @byron.bsky.social ) we provide a systematic attempt at measuring AI "slop" in text! arxiv.org/abs/2509.19163 🧵 (1/7)

I did a QA with Quanta about interpretability and training dynamics! I got to talk about a bunch of research hobby horses and how I got into them.

Ben Brubaker@benbenbrubaker.bsky.social · 11mo ago

I really enjoyed talking to @nsaphra.bsky.social about her thoughts on what much language model interpretability research misses. My latest in @quantamagazine.bsky.social:

The new Tahoe UI is so bad. Everything just looks so blurred...

Interesting opportunity for a research visit through the Azrieli foundation - azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell... Let me know if you're interested!

Call for Applications for the Azrieli International Visiting PhD Fellowship - The Azrieli Foundation

The Azrieli International Visiting PhD Fellowship offers outstanding international PhD candidates the opportunity to conduct short-term research in Israel, fostering academic collaboration and strengt...

azrielifoundation.org

Organizing a workshop? Checkout our compiled material for organizing one: www.bigpictureworkshop.com/open-workshop (and hopefully we'll be back for another iteration of the Big Picture next year w/ Allyson Ettinger, @norakassner.bsky.social, @sebruder.bsky.social)

I’m excited to share that I'm joining Bar-Ilan University as an assistant professor!

A strange trend I've noticed at #ACL2025 is that people are hesitant to reach out to papers/"academic products" authors. This is unfortunate for both parties! A simple email can save a lot of time to the sender, but is also one of my favorite kind of email as the receiver!

The EPFL NLP lab is looking to hire a postdoctoral researcher on the topic of designing, training, and evaluating multilingual LLMs: docs.google.com/document/d/1... Come join our dynamic group in beautiful Lausanne!

EPFL NLP Postdoctoral Scholar Posting - Swiss AI LLMs

The EPFL Natural Language Processing (NLP) lab is looking to hire a postdoctoral researcher candidate in the area of multilingual LLM design, training, and evaluation. This postdoctoral position is as...

docs.google.com

Had a really great and fun time with @yanai.bsky.social, Niloofar Mireshghallah, and Reza Shokri discussing memorisation at the @l2m2workshop.bsky.social panel. Thanks to the entire organising team and attendees for making this such a fantastic workshop! #ACL2025

Yanai Elazar@yanai.bsky.social · last yr.

I had a lot of fun contemplating about memorization questions at the @l2m2workshop.bsky.social panel yesterday together with Niloofar Mireshghallah and Reza Shokri, moderated by @pietrolesci.bsky.social who did a fantastic job! #ACL2025

I had a lot of fun contemplating about memorization questions at the @l2m2workshop.bsky.social panel yesterday together with Niloofar Mireshghallah and Reza Shokri, moderated by @pietrolesci.bsky.social who did a fantastic job! #ACL2025

I'll present our work w/ @santosh-tyss.bsky.social @yanai.bsky.social @barbaraplank.bsky.social on LLMs memorization of distributions of political leanings in their pretraining data! Catch us at L2M2 workshop @l2m2workshop.bsky.social #ACL2025 tmrw 📆 Aug 1, 14:00–15:30 📑 arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18282

Ai2 is excited to be at #ACL2025 in Vienna, Austria this week. Come say hello, meet the team, and chat about the future of NLP. See you there! 🤝📚

It's crazy that people give more than a single invited talk during the same conference (diff workshops). A single talk (done right) is challenging enough.

What if you could understand and control an LLM by studying its *smaller* sibling? Our new paper introduces the Linear Representation Transferability Hypothesis. We find that the internal representations of different-sized models can be translated into one another using a simple linear(affine) map.

I really like this take. Academia and the open source community should embrace transparency in data, even in the cost of the issues that come with it. These issues should be of course studied and documented, but not used as an indicator or a signal to shut down the whole operation.

Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · last yr.

Fully open machine learning requires not only GPU access but a community commitment to openness. (Some nostalgic lessons from the ImageNet decade.)

Prompting is our most successful tool for exploring LLMs, but the term evokes eye-rolls and grimaces from scientists. Why? Because prompting as scientific inquiry has become conflated with prompt engineering. This is holding us back. 🧵and new paper with @ari-holtzman.bsky.social .

What's up with @arxiv-cs-cl.bsky.social Wasn't the entire premise of this website to allow uploading of papers w/o the official peer review process??

Check out our take on Chain-of-Thought. I really like this paper as a survey on the current literature on what CoT is, but more importantly on what it's not. It also serves as a cautionary tale to the (apparently quite common) misuse of CoT as an interpretable method.

Fazl Barez@fbarez.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited to share our paper: "Chain-of-Thought Is Not Explainability"! We unpack a critical misconception in AI: models explaining their steps (CoT) aren't necessarily revealing their true reasoning. Spoiler: the transparency can be an illusion. (1/9) 🧵

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐋𝐋𝐌𝐬? Our method, Perfect Erasure Functions (PEF), erases concepts perfectly from LLM representations. We analytically derive PEF w/o parameter estimation. PEFs achieve pareto optimal erasure-utility tradeoff backed w/ theoretical guarantees. #AISTATS2025 🧵

I'll be at #NAACL2025: 🖇️To present my paper "Superlatives in Context", showing how the interpretation of superlatives is very context dependent and often implicit, and how LLMs handle such semantic underspecification 🖇️And we will present RewardBench on Friday Reach out if you want to chat!