Swabha Swayamdipta
Gabilan Assistant Professor • USC Viterbi CS • Associate Director of USC Center for AI and Society • USC NLP
My goal is to design frameworks that allow robust, and reliable frameworks that allow AI systems to be broadly and safely deployed, especially in applications with societal implications. Three directions that this corresponds to are:
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- Safety-Critical, Robust and Reliable Frameworks for Evaluation:
- What cannot be measured, cannot be improved. How can we reliably compare the generative capabilities of language models, and ensure our assessment is robust? How can we tell if performance match can translate to application safety, especially when there are societal implications? How can we evaluate new capabilities in LLMs when we do not necessarily know the correct answer?
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- Understanding the Mechanisms that Drive Language Technologies:
- Even the most reliable evaluation may not reveal much about the mechanisms driving powerful yet opaque models. What do model geometries reveal about the processes underlying our models, and how can we improve models through different designs? Are models by design limited to making some choices which can uniquely identify them?
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- Human and AI Collaboration:
- AI technologies are designed by humans and for humans, the future of AI involves cooperation and collaboration with humans. How can we say when a general-purpose model will reliably serve the custom utility for a human user? Where can these technologies complement human capabilities and where not?
These challenges require novel and creative techniques for redesigning generative evaluation to keep pace with model performance. This brings together a broad array of empirical research with theoretical fundamentals underlying language models.
news
Jul 11, 2024 | Honored to receive an NSF CISE grant on a Collaborative Research Proposal with Co-PIs Robin Jia, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Alvin Grissom III and John Lalor. |
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May 08, 2024 | Excited to receive the USC Office of Research and Innovation’s Zumberge Preliminary Studies DEI in Research Award with my co-PI Eric Rice. |
Apr 22, 2024 | Thrilled to be awarded a Research Fellowship at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley for spring 2025 under the program on “Large Language Models and Transformers, Part II.” |
Nov 30, 2023 | Excited to be appointed as an Associate Director of USC’s Center for AI in Society. |
Sep 11, 2023 | Honored to receive the Intel Rising Stars Award in 2023! |
selected publications
See here for a full list.- EMNLPIn Findings of EMNLP (to appear) , 2024
- EMNLPIn Proceedings of EMNLP (to appear) , 2024
- COLMIn Proceedings of COLM (to appear) , 2024
- ACLIn Proceedings of ACL , 2024
- ICLR
- EMNLP
- ACLIn Findings of ACL , 2023
- ACL
- EMNLPIn Findings of EMNLP , 2022
- EMNLPIn Findings of EMNLP , 2022
- NAACLIn Proc. of NAACL , 2022
- NAACLIn Proc. of NAACL , 2022
- ICMLIn Proc. of ICML , 2022
- NeurIPS
- ACLIn Proc. of ACL , 2021
- EACLIn Proc. of EACL , 2021
- EMNLPIn Proc. of EMNLP , 2020
- ACL
- ICML