Author name cluster

Vera Demberg

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5 papers

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AAMAS Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Planning Ahead with RSA: Efficient Signalling in Dynamic Environments by Projecting User Awareness across Future Timesteps

Anwesha Das
John Duff
Jörg Hoffmann
Vera Demberg

Adaptive agent design offers a way to improve human-AI collaboration on time-sensitive tasks in rapidly changing environments. In such cases, to ensure the human maintains an accurate understanding of critical task elements, an assistive agent must not only identify the highest priority information but also estimate how and when this information can be communicated most effectively, given that human attention represents a zero-sum cognitive resource where focus on one message diminishes awareness of other or upcoming information. We introduce a theoretical framework for adaptive signalling which meets these challenges by using principles of rational communication, formalised as Bayesian reference resolution using the Rational Speech Act (RSA) modelling framework, to plan a sequence of messages which optimise timely alignment between user belief and a dynamic environment. The agent adapts message specificity and timing to the particulars of a user and scenario based on projections of how prior-guided interpretation of messages will influence attention to the interface and subsequent belief update, across several timesteps out to a fixed horizon. In a comparison to baseline methods, we show that this effectiveness depends crucially on combining multi-step planning with a realistic model of user awareness. As the first application of RSA for communication in a dynamic environment, and for human- AI interaction in general, we establish theoretical foundations for pragmaticcommunicationinhuman-agentteams, highlightinghow insights from cognitive science can be capitalised to inform the design of assistive agents.

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TMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

B-cos LM: Efficiently Transforming Pre-trained Language Models for Improved Explainability

Yifan Wang
Sukrut Rao
Ji-Ung Lee
Mayank Jobanputra
Vera Demberg

Post-hoc explanation methods for black-box models often struggle with faithfulness and human interpretability due to the lack of explainability in current neural architectures. Meanwhile, B-cos networks have been introduced to improve model explainability by proposing an architecture that removes bias terms and promotes input-weight alignment. Although B-cos networks have shown success in building explainable systems, their application has so far been limited to computer vision models and their associated training pipelines. In this work, we introduce B-cos LMs, i.e., B-cos Language Models (LMs) empowered for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Our approach directly transforms pre-trained language models into B-cos LMs by combining B-cos conversion and task fine-tuning, improving efficiency compared to previous methods. Automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate that B-cos LMs produce more faithful and human interpretable explanations than post-hoc methods, while maintaining task performance comparable to conventional fine-tuning. Our in-depth analysis explores how B-cos LMs differ from conventionally fine-tuned models in their learning processes and explanation patterns. Finally, we present a first exploration of transforming decoder-only models to B-cos LMs for generation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ewanwong/bcos_lm.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Born a Transformer -- Always a Transformer? On the Effect of Pretraining on Architectural Abilities

Mayank Jobanputra
Yana Veitsman
Yash Sarrof
Aleksandra Bakalova
Vera Demberg
Ellie Pavlick
Michael Hahn

Transformers have theoretical limitations in modeling certain sequence-to-sequence tasks, yet it remains largely unclear if these limitations play a role in large-scale pretrained LLMs, or whether LLMs might effectively overcome these constraints in practice due to the scale of both the models themselves and their pretraining data. We explore how these architectural constraints manifest after pretraining by studying a family of retrieval and copying tasks inspired by Liu et al. [2024a]. We use a recently proposed framework for studying length generalization [Huang et al. , 2025] to provide guarantees for each of our settings. Empirically, we observe an induction-versus-anti-induction asymmetry, where pretrained models are better at retrieving tokens to the right (induction) rather than the left (anti-induction) of a query token. This asymmetry disappears upon targeted fine-tuning if length-generalization is guaranteed by theory. Mechanistic analysis reveals that this asymmetry is connected to the differences in the strength of induction versus anti-induction circuits within pretrained transformers. We validate our findings through practical experiments on real-world tasks demonstrating reliability risks. Our results highlight that pretraining selectively enhances certain transformer capabilities, but does not overcome fundamental length-generalization limits.

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TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

Aarohi Srivastava
Abhinav Rastogi
Abhishek Rao
Abu Awal Md Shoeb
Abubakar Abid
Adam Fisch
Adam R. Brown
Adam Santoro

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG- bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 450 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood develop- ment, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google- internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

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AAAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Improving Variational Encoder-Decoders in Dialogue Generation

Xiaoyu Shen
Hui Su
Shuzi Niu
Vera Demberg

Variational encoder-decoders (VEDs) have shown promising results in dialogue generation. However, the latent variable distributions are usually approximated by a much simpler model than the powerful RNN structure used for encoding and decoding, yielding the KL-vanishing problem and inconsistent training objective. In this paper, we separate the training step into two phases: The ﬁrst phase learns to autoencode discrete texts into continuous embeddings, from which the second phase learns to generalize latent representations by reconstructing the encoded embedding. In this case, latent variables are sampled by transforming Gaussian noise through multi-layer perceptrons and are trained with a separate VED model, which has the potential of realizing a much more ﬂexible distribution. We compare our model with current popular models and the experiment demonstrates substantial improvement in both metric-based and human evaluations.

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