Michael J. Ryan

Michael J. Ryan, Yanzhe Zhang, Amol Salunkhe et al. · gatech

Evaluating user-facing AI applications remains a central challenge, especially in open-ended domains such as travel planning, clinical note generation, or dialogue. The gold standard is user feedback (e.g., thumbs up/down) or behavioral signals (e.g., retention), but these are often scarce in prototypes and research projects, or too-slow to use for system optimization. We present AutoMetrics, a framework for synthesizing evaluation metrics under low-data constraints. AutoMetrics combines retrieval from MetricBank, a collection of 48 metrics we curate, with automatically generated LLM-as-a-Judge criteria informed by lightweight human feedback. These metrics are composed via regression to maximize correlation with human signal. AutoMetrics takes you from expensive measures to interpretable automatic metrics. Across 5 diverse tasks, AutoMetrics improves Kendall correlation with human ratings by up to 33.4% over LLM-as-a-Judge while requiring fewer than 100 feedback points. We show that AutoMetrics can be used as a proxy reward to equal effect as a verifiable reward. We release the full AutoMetrics toolkit and MetricBank to accelerate adaptive evaluation of LLM applications.

Yeahia Sarker, Abdullah-Al-Zubaer Imran, Md Hafiz Ahamed et al.

Deep learning-based super-resolution methods have shown great promise, especially for single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks. Despite the performance gain, these methods are limited due to their reliance on copious data for model training. In addition, supervised SISR solutions rely on local neighbourhood information focusing only on the feature learning processes for the reconstruction of low-dimensional images. Moreover, they fail to capitalize on global context due to their constrained receptive field. To combat these challenges, this paper proposes a novel image-specific solution, namely non-local variational autoencoder (\texttt{NLVAE}), to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) image from a single low-resolution (LR) image without the need for any prior training. To harvest maximum details for various receptive regions and high-quality synthetic images, \texttt{NLVAE} is introduced as a self-supervised strategy that reconstructs high-resolution images using disentangled information from the non-local neighbourhood. Experimental results from seven benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the \texttt{NLVAE} model. Moreover, our proposed model outperforms a number of baseline and state-of-the-art methods as confirmed through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Shangyin Tan, Lakshya A Agrawal, Arnav Singhvi et al.

Composing language models (LMs) into multi-step language programs and automatically optimizing their modular prompts is now a mainstream paradigm for building AI systems, but the tradeoffs in this space have only scarcely been studied before. We introduce LangProBe, the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating the architectures and optimization strategies for language programs, with over 2000 combinations of tasks, architectures, optimizers, and choices of LMs. Using LangProBe, we are the first to study the impact of program architectures and optimizers (and their compositions together and with different models) on tradeoffs of quality and cost. We find that optimized language programs offer strong cost--quality Pareto improvement over raw calls to models, but simultaneously demonstrate that human judgment (or empirical decisions) about which compositions to pursue is still necessary for best performance. We will open source the code and evaluation data for LangProBe.

Krista Opsahl-Ong, Michael J Ryan, Josh Purtell et al.

Language Model Programs, i.e. sophisticated pipelines of modular language model (LM) calls, are increasingly advancing NLP tasks, but they require crafting prompts that are jointly effective for all modules. We study prompt optimization for LM programs, i.e. how to update these prompts to maximize a downstream metric without access to module-level labels or gradients. To make this tractable, we factorize our problem into optimizing the free-form instructions and few-shot demonstrations of every module and introduce several strategies to craft task-grounded instructions and navigate credit assignment across modules. Our strategies include (i) program- and data-aware techniques for proposing effective instructions, (ii) a stochastic mini-batch evaluation function for learning a surrogate model of our objective, and (iii) a meta-optimization procedure in which we refine how LMs construct proposals over time. Using these insights we develop MIPRO, a novel algorithm for optimizing LM programs. MIPRO outperforms baseline optimizers on five of seven diverse multi-stage LM programs using a best-in-class open-source model (Llama-3-8B), by as high as 13% accuracy. We have released our new optimizers and benchmark in DSPy at http://dspy.ai

Tarek Naous, Michael J. Ryan, Anton Lavrouk et al.

We present a comprehensive evaluation of large language models for multilingual readability assessment. Existing evaluation resources lack domain and language diversity, limiting the ability for cross-domain and cross-lingual analyses. This paper introduces ReadMe++, a multilingual multi-domain dataset with human annotations of 9757 sentences in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, and Russian, collected from 112 different data sources. This benchmark will encourage research on developing robust multilingual readability assessment methods. Using ReadMe++, we benchmark multilingual and monolingual language models in the supervised, unsupervised, and few-shot prompting settings. The domain and language diversity in ReadMe++ enable us to test more effective few-shot prompting, and identify shortcomings in state-of-the-art unsupervised methods. Our experiments also reveal exciting results of superior domain generalization and enhanced cross-lingual transfer capabilities by models trained on ReadMe++. We will make our data publicly available and release a python package tool for multilingual sentence readability prediction using our trained models at: https://github.com/tareknaous/readme

Michael J Ryan, Omar Shaikh, Aditri Bhagirath et al. · gatech

Recent calls for pluralistic alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) encourage adapting models to diverse user preferences. However, most prior work on personalized reward models heavily rely on additional identity information, such as demographic details or a predefined set of preference categories. To this end, we introduce SynthesizeMe, an approach to inducing synthetic user personas from user interactions for personalized reward modeling. SynthesizeMe first generates and verifies reasoning to explain user preferences, then induces synthetic user personas from that reasoning, and finally filters to informative prior user interactions in order to build personalized prompts for a particular user. We show that using SynthesizeMe induced prompts improves personalized LLM-as-a-judge accuracy by 4.4% on Chatbot Arena. Combining SynthesizeMe derived prompts with a reward model achieves top performance on PersonalRewardBench: a new curation of user-stratified interactions with chatbots collected from 854 users of Chatbot Arena and PRISM.

Michael J. Ryan, Tarek Naous, Wei Xu

Recent advancements in high-quality, large-scale English resources have pushed the frontier of English Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) research. However, less work has been done on multilingual text simplification due to the lack of a diverse evaluation benchmark that covers complex-simple sentence pairs in many languages. This paper introduces the MultiSim benchmark, a collection of 27 resources in 12 distinct languages containing over 1.7 million complex-simple sentence pairs. This benchmark will encourage research in developing more effective multilingual text simplification models and evaluation metrics. Our experiments using MultiSim with pre-trained multilingual language models reveal exciting performance improvements from multilingual training in non-English settings. We observe strong performance from Russian in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. We further show that few-shot prompting with BLOOM-176b achieves comparable quality to reference simplifications outperforming fine-tuned models in most languages. We validate these findings through human evaluation.