activity
20152026
most citedClue: Cross-modal Coherence Modeling for Caption Generation

42 citations · 142 across the 52 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

56 papers

cs.CL2026

From Task Success to Productive Success: Evaluating Human-AI Collaboration by Quality and Cost

Saki Imai, Mert İnan, Malihe Alikhani

AI productivity is often measured by task completion time, economic value, or improvements in outcome quality. However, these measures usually treat collaboration as a black box wh…

cs.LG2026

MixDPO: Modeling Preference Strength for Pluralistic Alignment

Saki Imai, Pedram Heydari, Anthony Sicilia +3

Preference based alignment objectives implicitly assume that all human preferences are expressed with equal strength. In practice, however, preference strength varies across indivi…

cs.HC2025

"Nothing about us without us": Perspectives of Global Deaf and Hard-of-hearing Community Members on Sign Language Technologies

Katherine Atwell, Saki Imai, Danielle Bragg +1

There is accelerating interest in sign language technologies (SLTs), with increasing attention from both industry and academia. However, the perspectives of Deaf and Hard-of-hearin…

cs.CL2025

Identifying & Interactively Refining Ambiguous User Goals for Data Visualization Code Generation

Mert İnan, Anthony Sicilia, Alex Xie +3

Establishing shared goals is a fundamental step in human-AI communication. However, ambiguities can lead to outputs that seem correct but fail to reflect the speaker's intent. In t…

cs.CL2025

How Pragmatics Shape Articulation: A Computational Case Study in STEM ASL Discourse

Saki Imai, Lee Kezar, Laurel Aichler +5

Most state-of-the-art sign language models are trained on interpreter or isolated vocabulary data, which overlooks the variability that characterizes natural dialogue. However, hum…

cs.CL2025

Measuring How (Not Just Whether) VLMs Build Common Ground

Saki Imai, Mert İnan, Anthony Sicilia +1

Large vision language models (VLMs) increasingly claim reasoning skills, yet current benchmarks evaluate them in single-turn or question answering settings. However, grounding is a…

cs.CL2025

SiLVERScore: Semantically-Aware Embeddings for Sign Language Generation Evaluation

Saki Imai, Mert İnan, Anthony Sicilia +1

Evaluating sign language generation is often done through back-translation, where generated signs are first recognized back to text and then compared to a reference using text-base…

cs.AI2025

BASIL: Bayesian Assessment of Sycophancy in LLMs

Katherine Atwell, Pedram Heydari, Anthony Sicilia +1

Sycophancy (overly agreeable or flattering behavior) poses a fundamental challenge for human-AI collaboration, particularly in high-stakes decision-making domains such as health, l…

cs.CL2025

OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulation

Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Wenbo Li +13

Can large language models (LLMs) accurately simulate the next web action of a specific user? While LLMs have shown promising capabilities in generating ``believable'' human behavio…

cs.CY2025★ 1 cited

Human-centered explanation does not fit all: The interplay of sociotechnical, cognitive, and individual factors in the effect AI explanations in algorithmic decision-making

Yongsu Ahn, Yu-Ru Lin, Malihe Alikhani +1

Recent XAI studies have investigated what constitutes a \textit{good} explanation in AI-assisted decision-making. Despite the widely accepted human-friendly properties of explanati…

cs.CL2025★ 1 cited

Better Slow than Sorry: Introducing Positive Friction for Reliable Dialogue Systems

Mert İnan, Anthony Sicilia, Suvodip Dey +6

While theories of discourse and cognitive science have long recognized the value of unhurried pacing, recent dialogue research tends to minimize friction in conversational systems.…

cs.CL2025

Contextual ASR Error Handling with LLMs Augmentation for Goal-Oriented Conversational AI

Yuya Asano, Sabit Hassan, Paras Sharma +4

General-purpose automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems do not always perform well in goal-oriented dialogue. Existing ASR correction methods rely on prior user data or named en…

cs.AI2024★ 1 cited

Fairness at Every Intersection: Uncovering and Mitigating Intersectional Biases in Multimodal Clinical Predictions

Resmi Ramachandranpillai, Kishore Sampath, Ayaazuddin Mohammad +1

Biases in automated clinical decision-making using Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) impose significant disparities in patient care and treatment outcomes. Conventional approache…

cs.CL2024★ 1 cited

Accounting for Sycophancy in Language Model Uncertainty Estimation

Anthony Sicilia, Mert Inan, Malihe Alikhani

Effective human-machine collaboration requires machine learning models to externalize uncertainty, so users can reflect and intervene when necessary. For language models, these rep…

cs.CL2024

Eliciting Uncertainty in Chain-of-Thought to Mitigate Bias against Forecasting Harmful User Behaviors

Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani

Conversation forecasting tasks a model with predicting the outcome of an unfolding conversation. For instance, it can be applied in social media moderation to predict harmful user…

cs.CL2024

Learning Multimodal Cues of Children's Uncertainty

Qi Cheng, Mert İnan, Rahma Mbarki +6

Understanding uncertainty plays a critical role in achieving common ground (Clark et al.,1983). This is especially important for multimodal AI systems that collaborate with users t…

cs.CL2024

Generating Signed Language Instructions in Large-Scale Dialogue Systems

Mert İnan, Katherine Atwell, Anthony Sicilia +2

We introduce a goal-oriented conversational AI system enhanced with American Sign Language (ASL) instructions, presenting the first implementation of such a system on a worldwide m…

cs.CL2024

Active Learning for Robust and Representative LLM Generation in Safety-Critical Scenarios

Sabit Hassan, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani

Ensuring robust safety measures across a wide range of scenarios is crucial for user-facing systems. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate valuable data for safety measur…

cs.CL2024★ 1 cited

Studying and Mitigating Biases in Sign Language Understanding Models

Katherine Atwell, Danielle Bragg, Malihe Alikhani

Ensuring that the benefits of sign language technologies are distributed equitably among all community members is crucial. Thus, it is important to address potential biases and ine…

cs.RO2024

Coherence-Driven Multimodal Safety Dialogue with Active Learning for Embodied Agents

Sabit Hassan, Hye-Young Chung, Xiang Zhi Tan +1

When assisting people in daily tasks, robots need to accurately interpret visual cues and respond effectively in diverse safety-critical situations, such as sharp objects on the fl…

cs.CL2024

An Active Learning Framework for Inclusive Generation by Large Language Models

Sabit Hassan, Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani

Ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text representative of diverse sub-populations is essential, particularly when key concepts related to under-represented groups…

cs.CL2024

Evaluating Theory of (an uncertain) Mind: Predicting the Uncertain Beliefs of Others in Conversation Forecasting

Anthony Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani

Typically, when evaluating Theory of Mind, we consider the beliefs of others to be binary: held or not held. But what if someone is unsure about their own beliefs? How can we quant…

cs.CL2024

Dialogue with Robots: Proposals for Broadening Participation and Research in the SLIVAR Community

Casey Kennington, Malihe Alikhani, Heather Pon-Barry +20

The ability to interact with machines using natural human language is becoming not just commonplace, but expected. The next step is not just text interfaces, but speech interfaces…

cs.CL2024★ 1 cited

Learning to Generate Context-Sensitive Backchannel Smiles for Embodied AI Agents with Applications in Mental Health Dialogues

Maneesh Bilalpur, Mert Inan, Dorsa Zeinali +2

Addressing the critical shortage of mental health resources for effective screening, diagnosis, and treatment remains a significant challenge. This scarcity underscores the need fo…