I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). I am a member of the CLIP (Computational Linguistics and Information Processing) lab and also affiliated with UMD’s AI Interdisciplinary Institute (AIM) and Institute for Advanced Computer Study (UMIACS).
My expertise is at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP), empirical machine learning, and explainable AI. I research the interpretability of language models (LMs) and other neural networks, with the goal of increasing their transparency, reliability, safety, and utility. I also focus on providing natural language explanations to users of LMs that are faithful to models’ internal operations.
Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the University of Washington, working with Ashish Sabharwal and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. Before that, I received my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Georgia Tech, where I was advised by Mark Riedl.
Short Bio for Talks
Recent Updates
- Fall 2026: The Actionable Interpretability workshop will be happening again at COLM 2026! Submit by June 21st.
- Summer 2026: I'll be at ICML.
- Summer 2026: I'll be speaking at the Columbia ML Summer School.
- Summer 2026: New ICML position paper on "Actionable Interpretability", led by Hadas Orgad, that spun out of our ICML 2025 workshop.
- Summer 2026: Congrats to Shramay for having a paper accepted to ACL.
- Summer 2026: Congrats to Chenlong, Yuhang, Zhihan, and Dongping on their CVPR Findings paper (and my first paper at a vision conference).
- Spring 2026: Thanks to Coefficient Giving for supporting the lab's work on chain-of-thought monitoring. Press Release
- Spring 2026: New preprint, led by Stephen, on tracing steering vector circuits for steering long-form generation.
- Spring 2026: Congrats to Connor for having a paper on interpreting latent reasoning models at the ICLR Latent & Implicit Reasoning workshop.
- Spring 2026: A couple of recent news articles about our research: UMD CS Department, UMIACS
- Spring 2026: Congrats to Kartik for having a paper accepted to EACL.
- Fall 2025: I'm now a member of the NSF National Deep Inference Fabric's advisory board.
- Fall 2025: (Remote) invited talks at UCLA and Cambridge.
- Fall 2025: Invited talk at the Interplay workshop at COLM. See you in Montreal!
- Fall 2025: Starting as an assistant professor in the CS department at the University of Maryland. Go terps! press release.
- Summer 2025: Congrats to Alec Bunn on having a paper accepted to the ACL 2025 GEM workshop.
- Summer 2025: Invited talk at University of British Columbia.
- Summer 2025: Our Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark (MIB) was accepted to ICML 2025. Check out the website for all the benchmark resources. I am also organizing the Actionable Interpretability Workshop at ICML. See you in Vancouver!
- Spring 2025: Two papers accepted to ICLR 2025, the former as a spotlight.
- Winter 2024: Selected as a Rising Star in Machine Learning.
- Winter 2024: Recognized as an outstanding area chair at EMNLP 2024.
- Winter 2024: Paper proposing a taxonomy for model noncompliance accepted at NeurIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks.
- Winter 2024: Attending EMNLP in Miami. Checkout our 2 Findings papers and our position paper on mechanistic interpretability at the BlackBoxNLP workshop. Slides from my talk at BlackBoxNLP: here.
- Fall 2024: Attending COLM in Philly.
- Fall 2024: Selected as a Rising Star in Generative AI.
- Summer 2024: Check out our NAACL 2024 tutorial on Explanation in the Era of Large Language Models. See you in Mexico City!
- Spring 2024: One paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Easy Training Data for Hard Tasks, will appear at ACL 2024.
- Spring 2024: Gave a guest lecture in the graduate-level LLMs course at Washington University in St. Louis.
- Winter 2023: Recording of Sarthak Jain and I's invited talk ("Is Attention = Explanation? Past, Present, and Future") at the Big Picture workshop is available here (from 1:57).
- Winter 2023: Gave a talk to the Washington State Senate's Environment, Energy, and Technology Committee on "What is AI?".
- Winter 2023: Recognized as a top reviewer at NeurIPS 2023.
- Winter 2023: Two papers at EMNLP 2023, and giving an invited talk at the Big Picture workshop with Sarthak Jain. See you in Singapore!
- Winter 2023: Selected as a Rising Star in EECS.
- Winter 2023: Self-Refine published at NeurIPS.
- Fall 2023: Talks at UC Irvine, UCSD, and USC.
- Summer 2023: Slides and recording (from 7:45) of my invited talk at the ACL Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations workshop are available.
- Summer 2023: Awarded an Outstanding Area Chair award (top 1.5% of reviewers and chairs) at ACL 2023.
- Spring 2023: Quoted in this article about language model interpretability.
- Fall 2022: Talks at various NLP groups at the University of Washington (Tsvetshop, H2Lab, and Treehouse).
- Fall 2022: Two Findings papers at EMNLP 2022.
- Fall 2022: Co-organizing the BlackBoxNLP workshop at EMNLP 2022. See you in Abu Dhabi!
We are grateful to the following sponsors for their support of our research:
