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Reading Discussion on Monday Sept 19
by Ying Shen 19 Sep '22

19 Sep '22

Hello everyone, In next week's reading discussion, we will talk about: Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation <https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14217> This paper proposes to improve controllable text generation via a new language model based on continuous diffusions. I highly recommend you read the paper in advance and think about: 1. What's the diffusion model? 2. What method does Diffusion-LM use to control the generation of text? 3. Compared to other works on controllable text generation, what is the main advantage of this work? Any interesting idea we can derive from this work? 4. What are the limitations and remaining challenges of this work? 5. Any idea to address the remaining challenges? We will hold the discussion on Monday 4-5 pm in Torgersen 3160A. You may also join via Zoom https://virginiatech.zoom.us/j/5961845863. Hope everyone has a great weekend. Happy reading! Best, Ying

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next week meeting schedule
by Lifu Huang 18 Sep '22

18 Sep '22

Monday: 10-11am: Jingyuan 11-11:30am: Pritika 4-5pm: reading discussion, Ying lead Tuesday: 1:30-2:30pm: Zhiyang 2:30-3:30pm: Minqian 3:30-4pm: Sijia 4:30-5pm: Xiaochu, Zhiyang, Minqian 5-5:30pm: Jeet Wednesday: 9:30-10am: Zoe 10-10:30am: Yuxuan 10:30-11am: Mingchen 11-12pm: Simbot, Minqian, Ying, Zhiyang, Sijia, Menglong, Jingyuan pls attend 1:30-2:30pm: Menglong 2:30-3pm: Ting-Chih, Ying, Minqian 3-4pm: Ying Thursday: 4-5pm: Group meeting, Zhiyang pls prepare slides to talk about your instruction tuning work 5:30-6:30pm: Kmass-UCSB, Zhiyang, Minqian, Ying and Jingyuan pls attend --------------------------------- Lifu Huang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech

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next week meeting schedule
by Lifu Huang 11 Sep '22

11 Sep '22

Monday: 11-11:30am: Pritika 1-2pm: Jingyuan 4-5pm: reading discussion, Minqian lead Tuesday: 1:30-2:30pm: Zhiyang 2:30-3:30pm: Minqian 3:30-4pm: Sijia 4:30-5pm: Xiaochu, Zhiyang, Minqian 5-5:30pm: Jeet Wednesday: 9:30-10am: Zoe 10-10:30am: Yuxuan 10:30-11am: Mingchen 11-12pm: Simbot, Minqian, Ying, Zhiyang, Sijia, Menglong, Jingyuan and Daniel pls attend 1:30-2:30pm: Menglong, Daniel 2:30-3pm: Ting-Chih, Ying, Minqian 3-4pm: Ying Thursday: 4-5pm: Group meeting, Zhiyang pls prepare slides to talk about your instruction tuning work 5:30-6:30pm: Kmass-UCSB, Zhiyang, Minqian, Ying and Jingyuan pls attend --------------------------------- Lifu Huang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech

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next week meeting schedule
by Lifu Huang 04 Sep '22

04 Sep '22

I’m traveling from Tuesday to Friday next week, so I will just schedule meetings on Monday. Other students please continue to work on your projects. For SimBot, Minqian please still organize a meeting and discuss the progress from everyone. We need to start to combine everyone’s components into an overall system next week. Monday: 9:30-10:30am: Menglong 10:30-11am: Jingyuan 11-11:30am: Pritika 1:30-2:30pm: Ting-Chih, Minqian, Ying --------------------------------- Lifu Huang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech

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Reading Discussion on Monday Sept 5
by Minqian Liu 02 Sep '22

02 Sep '22

Hi all, In next week's reading discussion I will talk about: Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work? <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.12837.pdf> This paper analyses the effect of demonstrations on in-context learning, and I think it's very interesting. I highly recommend you read the paper in advance and think about: 1. What's the motivation, novelty, and contribution of this work? 2. What we can learn from this work? Any interesting idea we can derive from this work? 3. What are the limitations and remaining challenges of this work? 4. Any idea to address the remaining challenges? We will hold the discussion on Monday 4-5 pm in Torgersen 3160A. You may also join via Zoom https://virginiatech.zoom.us/j/5961845863. Hope everyone has a great weekend. Enjoy reading! Best, Minqian Liu

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next week meeting schedule
by Lifu Huang 28 Aug '22

28 Aug '22

Monday: 10-11am: Jingyuan 4-5pm: reading discussion, Zhiyang lead Tuesday: 1-1:30pm: Pritika 1:30-2:30pm: Zhiyang 3:30-4pm: Sijia 4-5pm: Minqian 5-5:30pm: Xiaochu, Zhiyang, Minqian 5:30-6pm: Jeet Wednesday: 9:30-10am: Zoe 10-10:30am: Yuxuan, Minqian 10:30-11am: Mingchen 11-12pm: Simbot, Minqian, Ying, Zhiyang, Sijia, Menglong, Jingyuan and Daniel pls attend 1:30-2:30pm: Menglong, Daniel 2:30-3pm: Ting-Chih, Ying, Minqian 3-4pm: Ying Thursday: 4-5pm: Group meeting, Ying pls prepare some slides to talk about your current work 5:30-6:30pm: Kmass-UCSB, Zhiyang, Minqian, Ying and Jingyuan pls attend --------------------------------- Lifu Huang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech

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Reading Discussion on Monday Aug 29
by Zhiyang Xu 27 Aug '22

27 Aug '22

Hi all, Next week I will talk about: InstructDial: Improving Zero and Few-shot Generalization in Dialogue through Instruction Tuning <https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12673> This is a new paper about instruction turning which I think it's a new and very promising research direction. In order to lead to meaningful discussion, I highly recommend you read the paper before and think about: 1. How did the author develop this idea and how would you identify and solve this problem? 2. Is there any related problem that can be solved by leveraging similar ideas? 3. What are the limitations and remaining challenges of this work? 4. Any idea to address the remaining challenges? We will hold the discussion meeting in Torgersen 3160A. You may also join via Zoom https://virginiatech.zoom.us/j/5961845863. Best, Zhiyang Xu

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next week meeting schedule
by Lifu Huang 21 Aug '22

21 Aug '22

Monday: 11-11:30am: Pritika Tuesday: 1:30-2:30pm: Zhiyang 2:30-3:30pm: Minqian 3:30-4pm: Sijia 4-4:30pm: Kazi 4:30-5pm: Xiaochu, Zhiyang, Minqian 5-5:30pm: Jeet Wednesday: 9:30-10am: Zoe 10-10:30am: Yuxuan, Minqian 10:30-11am: Mingchen 11-12pm: Ying 1:30-2:30pm: Menglong, Daniel 2:30-3pm: Ting-Chih, Ying, Minqian 3-4pm: Simbot, Minqian, Ying, Zhiyang, Sijia, Menglong pls attend Thursday: 4-5pm: Group meeting, Minqian pls prepare some slides to talk about your current continual learning work I will be at office. Please try to meet with me in person. If you cannot, pls meet with me on Zoom: https://virginiatech.zoom.us/j/5961845863 I’m planning to schedule the reading discussion at 4-5pm Monday. We will start it from the week of 8/29. I’m suggesting Zhiyang to lead the first one on 8/29. Each PhD student please sign up for at least 2 presentations here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LSaUY8hHcK3QzUf0iWjQT1KHk-r4SXh8av8… Please also mark your calendar for the following two talks: 9:30-10:30pm on Sep. 27: Manling Li from UIUC about Multimedia IE or Schema Induction 9:30-10:30am on Oct. 18: Avirup Sil from IBM about QA --------------------------------- Lifu Huang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech

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course schedule this Fall
by Lifu Huang 19 Aug '22

19 Aug '22

Hope everyone had a safe and relaxing summer! To schedule the 1-on-1 meetings in the Fall, please send me your course schedule by Saturday. I’m planning to continue the weekly group meeting (mainly for PhD students to report the research progress) and reading discussion meeting (to discuss new papers and brainstorm ideas). However, I’m not satisfied with the effect of these meetings in previous semesters. The goal of reading discussion is to discuss the most interesting and impactful papers that inspire new ideas, especially new task/approach design and research perspective. Many of you have such experience that when we design solutions to our own research, it’s difficult to come up with interesting and novel ideas with deep thinking. I hope we can improve this by (1) carefully selecting the papers that are really interesting and enlightening. This is a requirement for each presenter; (2) reading the papers before the meeting, actively and creatively thinking about and asking questions (e.g., what are the interesting ideas in this work, how did the authors developed the ideas and if you are the author how would you solve this problem, any better solutions to this problem, can the ideas be improved, what are their limitations, how to address the limitations, etc. You can find many tips for paper reading from online, e.g., tips, video). These brainstormings are very helpful to develop our research vision, grow to be researchers with critical thinking and perform cutting-edge research. Also, as PhD students, you should read papers everyday and read all the recent papers from arXiv and conference proceedings. This should not be pushed by me but actively done by yourselves. We will have a higher standard to our research starting from now on, and I will have higher expectation to each of you. I will discuss these more with PhD students. If you have any suggestions to make these research activities more effective, please feel free to let me know. --------------------------------- Lifu Huang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech

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Congrats to Minqian
by Lifu Huang 18 Aug '22

18 Aug '22

Congratulations to Minqian on a new paper accepted by COLING’22! --------------------------------- Lifu Huang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech

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