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Vilém Zouhar

@zouhar.bsky.social
3.7K followers 1.5K following 389 posts

PhD @ ETH Zürich | working on (multilingual) evaluation of NLP | on the academic job market | go #vegan | vilda.net

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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 19h
Masterclass in writing. @pinzhen.bsky.social maybe next WMT paper we can open with: "You are about to begin reading the latest WMT Terminology findings. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door. Tell the others right away."
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The Last Translation Benchmark is still open (10 accepted submissions in any language/dialect for coauthorship 🤩). last-translation-benchmark.vilda.net Also submit your model & try to beat LTB. We added all the latest models: North Small Translate (@cohere.com), Mistral Large 4, Qwen 3.8, congrats!
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Crazy that they named a whole scientific field and uni departments after OpenAI's latest repo.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
arxiv has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Exciting times to be doing science now. 🙂
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
AI is one such tool. Skeptics say that modern science will devolve into mathematics-as-chess, or mathematics-as-poetry [4], but I'm skeptical of these claims because science was never about generating papers. [4] The Future of Human Mathematics. Jacob Hilton. 2026 www.lesswrong.com/posts/iEkksm...
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The contributions from more theoretical fields were never just stacks of proofs of theorems [3]. Rather, the tools and the skill developed to solve these theoretical problems are useful for other applications. [3] What is good mathematics? Terence Tao. 2007 arxiv.org/abs/math/070...
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Constantly, we have to decide what new knowledge to let in and what to let go [2]. Having 10000 proofs written in Lean or automated papers misses this point. [2] The Craft of Writing Effectively. Larry McEnerney 2014 www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIz...
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Ironically, it's also making academia "healthier" by lowering the value of a publication so that these counts stop having meaning. Science is not just an accumulation of knowledge and artefacts (papers). Rather, it's about communication and this knowledge capacity is limited and fluctuating [2].
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This skill goes beyond just distinguishing slop/non-slop papers. It will make us critical (in a good way, to not fool ourselves [1]) even of our own writing, which is good for science. [1] Cargo cult science. Feynman 1974 calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCu...
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
...and some things that are not science will be considered science now. AI slop is overloading the peer review system, which short-term lowers the quality of science. Long-term, I believe it will have a positive impact because it will make us better readers of science.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Why enter the faculty job market now? I am deeply optimistic about the future of science and academia. With AI, some things that we considered science will not be science anymore (that sucks, we worked hard to learn how to sound fluent and typeset figures!) ...
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
My topics: - theoretical problems in evaluation (efficient, adaptive, comparable, robust evaluation) - practically useful evaluation methods (there's a reason why we default to just averaging scores on a dataset) - model improvement from (efficient & personalized) evaluation signal
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I'm on the faculty job market for Fall 2027 assistant professorship. I work on the science of AI/NLP evaluation, which is currently undergoing a crisis. Get in touch! My research statement is public: vilda.net
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Feynman's 1974 "cargo cult science" is more relevant than ever in today's research landscape. We need to learn how to not fool ourselves and not just imitate science on the superficial level. calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCu...
calteches.library.caltech.edu
Cargo Cult Science
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Reposted by Vilém Zouhar
Niyati Bafna @niyatibafna.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Then we prove this theorem.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
See you at EMNLP in Budapest! Also a big thank you to @mrinmaya.bsky.social @kocmitom.bsky.social @juliakreutzer.bsky.social @mattposts.bsky.social @rachelbawden.bsky.social @marinecarpuat.bsky.social @phikoehn.bsky.social, Ondřej, Alon, Roman, Sara, Parker, and Martin for the help and support.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
In the cESA annotation protocol, the annotators see multiple outputs at the same time, which they judge with error spans and absolute scores. This is faster and more objective than doing it one by one. It's implemented in Pearmut and used in WMT26. arxiv.org/abs/2607.26640 WMT
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Dynamic annotation allocation is a way to focus on better-performing candidates as the annotations progress. Heavily inspired by bandits and we prove the surprisingly A-optimality of a simple algorithm. It's implemented in Pearmut and used at scale in WMT26. arxiv.org/abs/2608.03437 EMNLP
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Pearmut is a tool to quickly set up reproducible human annotations. It mostly replaces Appraise at WMT, but already found many uses outside given its flexibility, incl. speech annotation and general text annotation. A small human eval can elevate most papers. arxiv.org/abs/2601.02933 EMNLP Demo
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I spent good part of this year thinking about the methods of evaluation, specifically the way they're used at scale such as WMT or IWSLT. Happy to announce that they will be presented at different places at EMNLP: - Pearmut - Dynamic Annotation Allocation - cESA Annotation Protocol
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
@pinzhen.bsky.social proposing to have a LTB translation olympiad where humans compete to produce the best translation. Honestly not a bad idea, since many LTB examples are sort of like solving a linguistic puzzle.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
GPT-6, I thought you were AGI?
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
The Parropticon.
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Reposted by Vilém Zouhar
Jannis Vamvas @vamvas.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Eine deutsche KI behauptet, Schweizerdeutsch zu können. Unser neuer Test sagt: «Chabis». vamvas.ch/benchmark-sw...
vamvas.ch
Eine deutsche KI behauptet, Schweizerdeutsch zu können. Unser neuer Test sagt: «Chabis»
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Forgot to mention that the paper was/is written in @typst.app (yes, you can upload Typst papers to arxiv). Doing this in LaTeX would've been a nightmare with manually updating text based on changing data or having to deal with LaTeX's lack of support for basic styling elements.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Last Translation Benchmark is a live paper+dataset and you can still join last-translation-benchmark.vilda.net Massive thanks to all the >250 dataset contributors and @niyatibafna.bsky.social @mukundc2k.bsky.social @maikezufle.bsky.social @pinzhen.bsky.social
last-translation-benchmark.vilda.net
Last Translation Benchmark
Current machine translation benchmarks are saturated. Last Translation Benchmark crowdsources a dataset of inputs that demonstrably break state-of-the-art translation models.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Machine translation doesn't break on just figurative language as one would expect. In fact, for the next generation of models, we may need to invest heavily into multilingual (& cultural) reasoning.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
We just released the Last Translation Benchmark paper. In a massive crowdsourcing effort we collected 3456 unique hard-to-translate examples that break state-of-the-art translation models, and which can be used for more reliable evaluation.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Machine translation is not solved and it will take a while for it to be done arxiv.org/abs/2609.04173
arxiv.org
Last Translation Benchmark
For scientific progress, we need benchmarks that test the limits of state-of-the-art models, and evaluation methods that inform us about failure cases. As models get stronger, standard benchmarks for ...
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
And if we play our cards right, this can be our future again. 🙂
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Antropic blundered on the PR of destructivelly scanning books. Now everyone is imagining they're chopping the first prints of Mrs Dalloway but it's probably mostly "Step by Step Microsoft Access 2003". They could've gone with "We're saving books from the landfill"
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
It happens to me every three years and I always go to this one StackOverflow post from ten years ago that has some magic --filter-branch --index-filter incantation that I copy & paste and then force push and then something breaks so I remove the old repo and push everything again as a single commit.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Already some examples from Dalimilova kronika 😀
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
I wonder if any of these old Czech examples would be good at breaking MTs? :-) last-translation-benchmark.vilda.net
last-translation-benchmark.vilda.net
Last Translation Benchmark
Current machine translation benchmarks are saturated. Last Translation Benchmark crowdsources a dataset of inputs that demonstrably break state-of-the-art translation models.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Effort is piloted by Alon Lavie, Greg Hanneman, @sted19.bsky.social, Shuoyang Ding with help of Ammon, Archchana, @chikiu-jackie-lo.bsky.social, @chryssazrv.bsky.social, @dipteshkanojia.bsky.social, Eleftherios, Fabio, Fred, Giorgos, Lorenzo, @sudomonish.bsky.social, Orfeas, @kocmitom.bsky.social
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Last chance (3 days!) to participate in the refreshed WMT evaluation shared task. Pick any subtask and submit an automatic metric that's aligned with human annotations of translation quality across many languages. www2.statmt.org/wmt26/mteval...
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Whoa, a multidimensionally topical tweet!
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
definitely a good time to be shorting Jacobians this week
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Several people on socials with no technical background told me they just retweet all papers stating they don't understand what the work is about. Asked about how they could trust the paper. They said when the paper is implemented at Google, the engineers will catch the errors.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Several reviewers with no technical background told me they reviewed for NeurIPS using agents, stating they didn't understand what the work is about. Asked how they could trust the review. They said when the paper hits the socials, the people will catch the errors.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
In fact the reviewing guidelines say that it's recommended to acknowledge the rebuttal but is hardly a cause for a procedural complaint. aclrollingreview.org/reviewerguid...
aclrollingreview.org
ARR Reviewer Guidelines
A peer review platform for the Association for Computational Linguistics
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Not many people know this but this button was not invented to complain that reviewers didn't give you a higher score.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
"Uniform" is likely infeasible, but the released dataset will do some balancing. For now, the more (of any language direction), the better. Part of the internal research is transplanting hard-to-translate examples between languages. Things hard in Hindi->English are probably hard in Hindi->German.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
This effort would be impossible without the amazing research team of @niyatibafna.bsky.social @maikezufle.bsky.social @lchoshen.bsky.social @patuchen.bsky.social @gsarti.com @vamvas.bsky.social @mukundc2k.bsky.social and the support of many many others. 🩶 Stay tuned for more cool updates!
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Today we're opening the platform to public contributors with first release planned on September 1st. Don't miss out! 🪨 Contribute here: last-translation-benchmark.vilda.net
last-translation-benchmark.vilda.net
Last Translation Benchmark
Current machine translation benchmarks are saturated. Last Translation Benchmark crowdsources a dataset of inputs that demonstrably break state-of-the-art translation models.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
We're already accepted more than 500 examples from 118 contributors across many many languages (dialects are more than welcome!). We'll be analyzing these, putting them in a rolling-release dataset, and writing a paper about it.
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
In the Last Translation Benchmark we solve both by: - collecting hard-to-translate inputs (texts, images, audios) - requiring human-readable "verification rules", which enable provable evaluation of future translations Here are some cool examples:
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Multiple things made us start this effort. Typical translation benchmarks are.. ...oftentimes trivial or saturated (so they can't be used for guiding the next steps in the field) ...not evaluatable well (automated metrics are brittle and humans are expensive and irreproducible)
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Vilém Zouhar @zouhar.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
There are many things machine translation still can't do. Help us steer the next direction by contributing hard-to-translate inputs (and be on a cool paper).
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