Portrait of Siva Reddy

Siva Reddy

Core Academic Member
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Assistant Professor, McGill University, School of Computer Science and Department of Linguistics
Research Topics
Deep Learning
Natural Language Processing
Reasoning
Representation Learning

Biography

Siva Reddy is an assistant professor at the School of Computer Science and in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University. He completed a postdoc with the Stanford NLP Group in September 2019.

Reddy’s research goal is to enable machines with natural language understanding abilities in order to facilitate applications like question answering and conversational systems. His expertise includes building symbolic (linguistic and induced) and deep learning models for language.

Current Students

PhD - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Collaborating researcher
PhD - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
PhD - McGill University
Collaborating Alumni - UNIVERSITÄT DES SAARLANDES
PhD - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
PhD - Polytechnique Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Research Intern - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Postdoctorate - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Collaborating researcher
Research Intern - McGill University
Postdoctorate - McGill University
Research Intern - McGill University
Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University
Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Publications

Faithfulness Measurable Masked Language Models
Andreas Madsen
WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialogue
Xing Han Lu
Zdeněk Kasner
Universal Adversarial Triggers Are Not Universal
Nicholas Meade
Arkil Patel
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Parishad BehnamGhader
Vaibhav Adlakha
Marius Mosbach
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Parishad BehnamGhader
Vaibhav Adlakha
Marius Mosbach
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Parishad BehnamGhader
Vaibhav Adlakha
Marius Mosbach
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 3 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 7B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data. Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Parishad BehnamGhader
Vaibhav Adlakha
Marius Mosbach
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Parishad BehnamGhader
Vaibhav Adlakha
Marius Mosbach
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Parishad BehnamGhader
Vaibhav Adlakha
Marius Mosbach
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Parishad BehnamGhader
Vaibhav Adlakha
Marius Mosbach
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
Scope Ambiguities in Large Language Models
Gaurav Kamath
Sebastian Schuster
Sowmya Vajjala
Abstract Sentences containing multiple semantic operators with overlapping scope often create ambiguities in interpretation, known as scope … (see more)ambiguities. These ambiguities offer rich insights into the interaction between semantic structure and world knowledge in language processing. Despite this, there has been little research into how modern large language models treat them. In this paper, we investigate how different versions of certain autoregressive language models—GPT-2, GPT-3/3.5, Llama 2, and GPT-4—treat scope ambiguous sentences, and compare this with human judgments. We introduce novel datasets that contain a joint total of almost 1,000 unique scope-ambiguous sentences, containing interactions between a range of semantic operators, and annotated for human judgments. Using these datasets, we find evidence that several models (i) are sensitive to the meaning ambiguity in these sentences, in a way that patterns well with human judgments, and (ii) can successfully identify human-preferred readings at a high level of accuracy (over 90% in some cases).1
Scope Ambiguities in Large Language Models
Gaurav Kamath
Sebastian Schuster
Sowmya Vajjala
Abstract Sentences containing multiple semantic operators with overlapping scope often create ambiguities in interpretation, known as scope … (see more)ambiguities. These ambiguities offer rich insights into the interaction between semantic structure and world knowledge in language processing. Despite this, there has been little research into how modern large language models treat them. In this paper, we investigate how different versions of certain autoregressive language models—GPT-2, GPT-3/3.5, Llama 2, and GPT-4—treat scope ambiguous sentences, and compare this with human judgments. We introduce novel datasets that contain a joint total of almost 1,000 unique scope-ambiguous sentences, containing interactions between a range of semantic operators, and annotated for human judgments. Using these datasets, we find evidence that several models (i) are sensitive to the meaning ambiguity in these sentences, in a way that patterns well with human judgments, and (ii) can successfully identify human-preferred readings at a high level of accuracy (over 90% in some cases).1