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Freda Shi

@fredashi.bsky.social
397 followers 185 following 84 posts

Assistant Professor & Canada CIFAR AI Chair, University of Waterloo & Vector Institute | Excited about "grounding" in any form | Feeder of 2 🐈 | 🏸, 🏐, 🏂 | she/her

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Reposted by Freda Shi
Computational Linguistics Journal @complingjournal.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Hallucinations pose a substantial challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Zhang et al. survey methods of detection, explanation, & mitigation of hallucination, & provide a taxonomy & list of benchmarks for evaluation in this paper: doi.org/10.1162/COLI... @fredashi.bsky.social
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
I’m not an author of that paper though, only a careful proofreader.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
I think you got it, and yes, I will do that after completing my current assignment (roughly the same type of contribution as the aforementioned paper).
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
It's on a niche topic, but I'd say it's (one of) the most canonical types of work on X.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
And yes, I work on X, so it's clear what X is.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Are you really "Transactions of X"???
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
My student and her undergrad advisor submitted their very elegant work on X to "Transactions of X" and got desk-rejected, with the reason: "Your paper is very interesting and a very hardcore contribution to X, but we can't find appropriate reviewers, so we have to desk-reject it." Excuse me???
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
One can do that at the non-AI conferences (e.g., ACL 😜) as well. Only one reviewer complained (cf. aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon... actually no AI used in writing). @kanishka.bsky.social can verify as well 😇
aclanthology.org
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
Wow, learned about an even more impressive statement today: We are Sorry to inform you that you Didn’t Get the Honor for Voluntary Contribution because the speakers you invited (including yours truly) are Not Famous Enough.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
You are the best.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
haha you got it :)
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
We are Sorry to inform you that you Didn't Get the Honor for Voluntary Contribution because you onboarded Junior People.
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Reposted by Freda Shi
Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
We are Delighted to Congratulate you on the Honor of the Opportunity of Volunteering
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
At least I am :) I get mad when things start to be nonlinear.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Recent takes from this effort: Humans are largely linear animals, and we are so used to all kinds of linear structures, including doing tasks one by one.
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Reposted by Freda Shi
Abdellah Fourtassi @fourtassi.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
Open PhD/Postdoc position (start: Oct 2026). Topic: AI/LLMs and child language/communicative/cognitive development. The exact project will be shaped with the candidate. Join our team @univ-amu.fr at the intersection of computer and cognitive science (& right next to the Calanques!). Send me your CV!
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
A ton of HCI/HAI research questions are going on here!
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
I've noticed a few times that the AI coding agents' output isn't perfectly aligned with what I wanted, and this usually comes from the underspecification in my instructions. So my workflow still forces AI to follow my coding style, and I'll chime in whenever I want.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
I truly feel this AI-assisted development is something completely new. The key difference is the design philosophy: I also like Notion, for example, but I had to adapt myself to their design. Now the assistant bot and myself are doing "bidirectional alignment"---AI coding agents enable this.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
My guess is they are probably running some sort of "business" helping others "build their profile for visa", by taking the duty, submitting sloppy reviews, and claiming that's done by others who need it to apply for the visa...
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
I'm quite happy with the experience so far, and my take is---semantic parsing in the wild is THE most important NLP task, and personalized prompting is already quite satisfying for simple tasks. (2/2)
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
I've been enjoying developing a (safe & fairly reliable) personal assistant bot, partly motivated by some light experience trying OpenClaw. For safety, everything is run & saved locally. I can now manage my todo list, notebook, and calendar simply by speaking to my bot. (1/)
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
As far as I can tell, the immigrant visas don't demand that many reviews. 20 is probably more than enough.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Interesting piece to read on how VLMs encode properties of objects!
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
🐻
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
That said, I also like the less intellectually exciting ones as they are solid analyses or methodological enhancements that work for realistic scenarios. It's even hard for me to "rank" them. I'm already prepared to see a reversed ranking from reviewers. (2/2)
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
I frankly don't think the ICML policy of having authors rank their papers will work. I have 3-5 submissions (depending on ICLR results) this time to quite different subcommunities. I know my favorite submissions could be quite controversial---people either like or dislike them a lot. (1/2)
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Reposted by Freda Shi
Abdellah Fourtassi @fourtassi.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
Thrilled to announce the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL) at ACL 2026 🎉 A new venue at the intersection of development linguistics × modern NLP, spearheaded by @fredashi.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social, and and outstanding team of colleagues! A thread 🧵
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
(1) is "what AI is good at," and (2) is "what typical humans are bad at." But AI is not so good at *creatively* generating ideas that "make sense." Proposing such ideas is a task that does not match either criterion above, and is where human intelligence will keep shining. 2/2
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
AI coding is now the best at implementing things that are (1) either already standardized or not very ambiguous in their natural-language description, and (2) with many details. Yes, I just vibe-coded a helper for some organizational matters, and will do more. 1/
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
Yeah I feel it’s indeed easier to have an okay statement with LLM draft, but its emphases are almost always off…
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
You mean narrative CV or something else? I tried using LLM to generate one but… garbage
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Reposted by Freda Shi
Michael Saxon @saxon.me · 30/10/2025
It's #NSF #GRFP application season again so it's time to re-up my GRFP application advice post! Also, check out the cool bsky comment integration I've added to the blog! Engagement with this post will go under the blogpost on my site as comments! saxon.me/blog/2024/gr...
saxon.me
NSF GRFP Application Tips for NLP, AI, CS
Reflections and advice from my successful NSF GRFP proposal in NLP. Why I think my applications worked well, what I wish I did differently, and links to my actual statements and feedback from the GRFP...
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
Reviewer timeliness by area (based on a small sample of 14 papers * 4 reviewers each): Multilingual LMs >> VLMs > LLM Reasoning.
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Reposted by Freda Shi
Artjoms Šeļa @artjomshl.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
We have updated our collection of multilingual poetry corpora PoeTree. With addition of Norwegian, and few metadata fixes it now has a loud label of 1.0.0 release! 🌳 versologie.cz/poetree/vers...
versologie.cz
PoeTree. Poetry corpora in 11 languages
PoeTree is a standardized collection of poetry corpora comprising nearly 335,000 poems in ten languages (Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, ...
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
Should be fun to read!
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
I can only go through <40 slides in a one-hour talk... verified multiple times. My job talk has 39 slides (including acknowledgement), and so are my recent talks. Always impressed when folks present 100 slides in the same amount of time.
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Reposted by Freda Shi
Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
In 2016 Hinton predicted that AI would replace all radiologists in five years. Ten years later, why hasn't it happened? This post is a great explainer. www.understandingai.org/p/ai-isnt-re...
understandingai.org
AI isn't replacing radiologists
Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
Thanks, Chenhao! It's my pleasure helping with streamlining things in the backend - quite some pain but also fun :-)))
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
🚀 ACL ARR is looking for a Co-CTO to join me lead our amazing tech team and drive the future of our workflow. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, let’s connect! RTs & recommendations appreciated.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
Same! I‘ve literally unbidden 0 out of my recommended batch.
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
Also, is it now common to assume all reviewers are irresponsible and start to threaten them before deadline?
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
Is there a specific reason that NeurIPS does not show AC identity to reviewers? I'm very curious about who sent the polite reminders, and of course, even more curious about the rude ones.
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Reposted by Freda Shi
Hokin @hokin.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
#CoreCognition #LLM #multimodal #GrowAI We spent 3 years to curate 1503 classic experiments spanning 12 core concepts in human cognitive development and evaluated on 230 MLLMs with 11 different prompts for 5 times to get over 3.8 millions inference data points. A thread (1/n) - #ICML2025 ✅
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
Just in case this personal latex environmental setup is helpful to a broader crowd ⬇️
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
I use local complication w/ VSCode latex workshop plugin + git for version control. Pros: better hierarchical organization & doesn’t require internet. Cons: sometimes need to resolve conflict (usually fine if commit frequently) & require a powerful laptop to match overleaf compilation speed.
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Reposted by Freda Shi
Ana Marasović @anamarasovic.bsky.social · 03/05/2025
I'm late to the NAACL party, but I've just arrived in Albuquerque! I'll talk about measuring faithfulness of verbalized reasoning on *Sunday* at Repl4NLP at *9:45*.
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Reposted by Freda Shi
Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
hello NAACL friends I'm giving a keynote today at RepL4NLP at 1:30PM local time, come say hi! I'll mostly be musing about things with light research discussions
Screenshot of a slide that says "what does it take to convince ourselves that a system is exhibiting compositionality?" with a side comment "mostly AI, but humans too!!" for the word system
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
If you are also at NAACL, let's chat!
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Freda Shi @fredashi.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
Tutorial website here: language-grounding.github.io. More material forthcoming.
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