'Gentle' you say... :D

Can someone familiar with MultiWOZ evaluation answer a question for me: when predicting a system response mid-conversation, do we condition that on past user utterances and (1) past *gold standard* system utterances or (2) past *predicted* system utterances?

I'm told this is Twitter-worthy news: I'm impressed by the quality of the AACL reviews my paper got. The scores are low but they are backed by insightful and actionable feedback. Plus, I think it's cool we can submit a revised draft. Thanks AACL 2025!

As an alternative to large image captioning models, we introduce SMALLCAP: a lightweight-training model augmented with retrieved captions by prompting a pre-trained decoder arxiv.org/abs/2209.15323 by me, Bruno Martins Desmond Elliott, Yova Kementchedjhieva

Are you looking to do a Ph.D/Postdoc in multimodal learning? I'm supporting applications to join my group with a fully-funded @DataScienceDK Fellowship. Ph.D: ddsa.dk/phdfellowshipp… Postdoc: ddsa.dk/postdocfellows… Apply: March 23 Start: September 23

debugging in Python: - `print()`s alone: too simple - `import pdb; pdb.set_trace()`: too complex - `import code; code.interact(local=locals())`: just right simply drops you into interpreter, perfect for 95% of debugging

We're presenting SmallCap, a lightweight image captioning model with retrieval augmentation at #CVPR2025. If you're around, come chat with us! #CVPR2023 Yova Kementchedjhieva

✴ Hiring a Postdoctoral Researcher ✴ I am hiring a postdoc with a background in *vision and language processing*, on a 2/3 year contract. Application deadline: 15 Feb 2024 Start: ASAP Apply here: mbzuai.ac.ae/vacancy/postdo… and contact me here or via email. #NLProc #hiring

Postdoc opening for research on Vision-Language Modeling at MBZUAI with me and thamar |. 1 year position with possibility for extension. Please share and get in touch if you're interested!

The Call for Tasks for IOAI 2026 is open! ioai-official.org/call-for-tasks/ If you have a cool idea for a fun and challenging task, make sure to participate!