iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Akhila Yerukola @akhilayerukola.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Did you know gifting four koi 🐟 is offensive in Japan (4 = "shi" = death 💀), or that chopsticks 🥢upright in rice is inappropriate in China (like funeral incense 🕯️)? Top VLMs don't! Our #COLM2026 paper introduces 🌏NormViz to measure visual norm understanding in 16 countries. Best model: 25.3% 🚨 🧵👇

Overview of NORMVIZ-BENCH for visual norm understanding, consisting of 3,272 contrastive image pairs across 16 countries that differ only in the culturally relevant behavior. (a) A contrastive pair example from Japan; group accuracy requires a model to correctly classify both images in a pair. (b) Images are sourced via Text-to-Image generation,
inpainting, and Retrieval. (c) Benchmark statistics and pair type distribution.

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Shaily @shaily99.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

🎭 How do LLMs (mis)represent culture? 🧮 How often? 🧠 Misrepresentations = missing knowledge? spoiler: NO! At #CHI2026 we are bringing ✨TALES✨ a participatory evaluation of cultural (mis)reps & knowledge in multilingual LLM-stories for India 📜 arxiv.org/abs/2511.21322 1/10

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Julia Mendelsohn @jmendelsohn2.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

I will be at #COLM2025 this week, and would love to connect with folks interested in applications (and critiques) of language modeling in social science research! And join us for the NLP4Democracy workshop on Friday! sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e... #NLP #NLProc #LLM #ComputationalSocialScience

sites.google.com

NLP 4 Democracy - COLM 2025

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Valentina Pyatkin @valentinapy.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

🔈For the SoLaR workshop @COLM_conf we are soliciting opinion abstracts to encourage new perspectives and opinions on responsible language modeling, 1-2 of which will be selected to be presented at the workshop. Please use the google form below to submit your opinion abstract ⬇️

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Akhila Yerukola @akhilayerukola.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

I'll be at #ACL2025🇦🇹!! Would love to chat about all things pragmatics 🧠, redefining "helpfulness"🤔 and enabling better cross-cultural capabilities 🗺️ 🫶 Presenting our work on culturally offensive nonverbal gestures 👇 🕛Wed @ Poster Session 4 📍Hall 4/5, 11:00-12:30

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Language Technologies Institute | CMU @ltiatcmu.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Hand gestures are a major mode of human communication, but they don't always translate well across cultures. New research from @akhilayerukola.bsky.social, @maartensap.bsky.social and others is aimed at giving AI systems a hand with overcoming cultural biases: lti.cmu.edu/news-and-eve...

lti.cmu.edu

Using Hand Gestures To Evaluate AI Biases - Language Technologies Institute - School of Computer Science - Carnegie Mellon University

LTI researchers have created a model to help generative AI systems understand the cultural nuance of gestures.

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Shaily @shaily99.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

🖋️ Curious how writing differs across (research) cultures? 🚩 Tired of “cultural” evals that don't consult people? We engaged with interdisciplinary researchers to identify & measure ✨cultural norms✨in scientific writing, and show that❗LLMs flatten them❗ 📜 arxiv.org/abs/2506.00784 [1/11]

An overview of the work “Research Borderlands: Analysing Writing Across Research Cultures” by Shaily Bhatt, Tal August, and Maria Antoniak. The overview describes that We survey and interview interdisciplinary researchers (§3) to develop a framework of writing norms that vary across research cultures (§4) and operationalise them using computational metrics (§5). We then use this evaluation suite for two large-scale quantitative analyses: (a) surfacing variations in writing across 11 communities (§6); (b) evaluating the cultural competence of LLMs when adapting writing from one community to another (§7).

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Lindia Tjuatja @lindiatjuatja.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

When it comes to text prediction, where does one LM outperform another? If you've ever worked on LM evals, you know this question is a lot more complex than it seems. In our new #acl2025 paper, we developed a method to find fine-grained differences between LMs: 🧵1/9

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Julia Mendelsohn @jmendelsohn2.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

📣 Super excited to organize the first workshop on ✨NLP for Democracy✨ at COLM @colmweb.org!! Check out our website: sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e... Call for submissions (extended abstracts) due June 19, 11:59pm AoE #COLM2025 #LLMs #NLP #NLProc #ComputationalSocialScience

sites.google.com

NLP 4 Democracy - COLM 2025

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Clara Na @clarana.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

Yes! tbh this method is probably much more immediately useful for helping one understand subtle differences between [models trained on] subtly different data subsets, vs a loftier goal of helping one find "the" best data mixture -- to anyone considering this method, please feel free to reach out :)

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Akhila Yerukola @akhilayerukola.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

These days RAG systems have gotten popular for boosting LLMs—but they're brittle💔. Minor shifts in phrasing (✍️ style, politeness, typos) can wreck the pipeline. Even advanced components don’t fix the issue. Check out this extensive eval by @neelbhandari.bsky.social and @tianyucao.bsky.social!

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MilaNLP Lab @milanlp.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

📖For our last @MilaNLProc lab seminar, it was a pleasure to have @akhilayerukola.bsky.social presenting "Need for Culturally Contextual Safety Guardrails: A Case Study in Non-Verbal Gestures".

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siddhant-arora.bsky.social @siddhant-arora.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

🚀 New #ICLR2025 Paper Alert! 🚀 Can Audio Foundation Models like Moshi and GPT-4o truly engage in natural conversations? 🗣️🔊 We benchmark their turn-taking abilities and uncover major gaps in conversational AI. 🧵👇 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2503.01174

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Shaily @shaily99.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Check out Akhila'S VERY cool work on culturally contextual hand gestures and how current systems (can't) handle them 🤖

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Maarten Sap @maartensap.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

My PhD student Akhila's been doing some incredible cultural work in the last few years! Check out out latest work on cultural safety and hand gestures, showing most vision and/or language AI systems are very cross-culturally unsafe!

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Akhila Yerukola @akhilayerukola.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Did you know? Gestures used to express universal concepts—like wishing for luck—vary DRAMATICALLY across cultures? 🤞means luck in US but deeply offensive in Vietnam 🚨 📣 We introduce MC-SIGNS, a test bed to evaluate how LLMs/VLMs/T2I handle such nonverbal behavior! 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2502.17710

Figure showing that interpretations of gestures vary dramatically across regions and cultures. ‘Crossing your fingers,’ commonly used in the US to wish for good luck, can be deeply offensive to female audiences in parts of Vietnam. Similarly, the 'fig gesture,' a playful 'got your nose' game with children in the US, carries strong sexual connotations in Japan and can be highly offensive.

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Akhila Yerukola @akhilayerukola.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Coding agents often don’t ask follow-up clarifying questions 🤷‍♀️ But interactivity isn’t about asking more questions—it’s about asking better questions! 🤖💬 Check out this new work led by Sanidhya Vijay! www.linkedin.com/in/sanidhya-...

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