[Colloquium] Controllable and Creative Natural Language Generation January 30th

[Markayla Epps via Colloquium]

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
PRESENTS

Nanyun Peng
Associate Professor Computer Science
UCLA

Thursday, January 30th
1:00PM – 2:00PM
Location : TTIC 530
Speaker will Join Via Zoom: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/97708787366?pwd=qD9KdtzwGCTPuciAfr6iaap3NubZgy.1

Title: Controllable and Creative Natural Language Generation

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) applications, including text classification, summarization, machine translation, and dialogue systems. As LLMs grow increasingly capable, the need to control their generation process becomes more pressing, particularly for high-stakes applications that demand reliable outputs adhering to specific guidelines or creative outputs within defined boundaries. However, the dominant auto-regressive paradigm—training models to predict the next word based on prior context—poses significant challenges for enforcing structural or content-specific constraints.

In this talk, I will present our recent work on controllable natural language generation (NLG) that moves beyond the conventional auto-regressive framework to enhance both the reliability and creativity of generative models. I will introduce controllable decoding-time algorithms that guide auto-regressive models to better align with user-specified constraints. Additionally, I will discuss a novel insertion-based generation paradigm that breaks away from the limitations of auto-regressive methods. These approaches enable more reliable and creative outputs, with applications spanning creative writing, lexical-controlled generation, and commonsense-compliant text generation.

 Bio: Nanyun (Violet) Peng is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department at UCLA and a Visiting Academic at Amazon AGI. She directs the PLUSLAB (Peng's Language Understanding and Synthesis Lab) at UCLA, which received three Outstanding Paper Awards from EMNLP 2024 last November. Her research focuses on controllable and creative language generation, multilingual and multimodal models, and the development of automatic evaluation metrics, with a strong commitment to advancing robust and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI).


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Markayla Epps
Business Assistant
Computer Science Department
The University of Chicago
5730 S. Ellis - JCL 212
Chicago, IL 60637
Markayla at uchicago.edu
(773) 702-0723
https://cs.uchicago.edu/


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