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 - McGill University
Research Intern - McGill University
Postdoctorate - McGill University
Independent visiting researcher
Co-supervisor :
Master's Research - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
Collaborating researcher
PhD - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
PhD - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
PhD - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
Master's Research - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
PhD - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Postdoctorate - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Collaborating researcher - N/A
Collaborating researcher - McGill University
Collaborating Alumni
Research Intern - McGill University
Collaborating researcher - McGill University

Publications

Scope Ambiguities in Large Language Models
Sebastian Schuster
Sowmya Vajjala
Sentences containing multiple semantic operators with overlapping scope often create ambiguities in interpretation, known as scope ambiguiti… (see more)es. 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).
Can Retriever-Augmented Language Models Reason? The Blame Game Between the Retriever and the Language Model
Augmenting pretrained language models with retrievers to select the supporting documents has shown promise in effectively solving common NLP… (see more) problems, including language modeling and question answering, in an interpretable way. In this paper, we first study the strengths and weaknesses of different retriever-augmented language models (REALM,
Evaluating Dependencies in Fact Editing for Language Models: Specificity and Implication Awareness
Jackie C.K. Cheung
The potential of using a large language model (LLM) as a knowledge base (KB) has sparked significant interest. To maintain the knowledge acq… (see more)uired by LLMs, we need to ensure that the editing of learned facts respects internal logical constraints, which are known as dependency of knowledge. Existing work on editing LLMs has partially addressed the issue of dependency, when the editing of a fact should apply to its lexical variations without disrupting irrelevant ones. However, they neglect the dependency between a fact and its logical implications. We propose an evaluation protocol with an accompanying question-answering dataset, StandUp, that provides a comprehensive assessment of the editing process considering the above notions of dependency. Our protocol involves setting up a controlled environment in which we edit facts and monitor their impact on LLMs, along with their implications based on If-Then rules. Extensive experiments on StandUp show that existing knowledge editing methods are sensitive to the surface form of knowledge, and that they have limited performance in inferring the implications of edited facts.
Using In-Context Learning to Improve Dialogue Safety
Devamanyu Hazarika
Di Jin
Yang Liu
Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Are Diffusion Models Vision-And-Language Reasoners?
Text-conditioned image generation models have recently shown immense qualitative success using denoising diffusion processes. However, unlik… (see more)e discriminative vision-and-language models, it is a non-trivial task to subject these diffusion-based generative models to automatic fine-grained quantitative evaluation of high-level phenomena such as compositionality. Towards this goal, we perform two innovations. First, we transform diffusion-based models (in our case, Stable Diffusion) for any image-text matching (ITM) task using a novel method called DiffusionITM. Second, we introduce the Generative-Discriminative Evaluation Benchmark (GDBench) benchmark with 7 complex vision-and-language tasks, bias evaluation and detailed analysis. We find that Stable Diffusion + DiffusionITM is competitive on many tasks and outperforms CLIP on compositional tasks like like CLEVR and Winoground. We further boost its compositional performance with a transfer setup by fine-tuning on MS-COCO while retaining generative capabilities. We also measure the stereotypical bias in diffusion models, and find that Stable Diffusion 2.1 is, for the most part, less biased than Stable Diffusion 1.5. Overall, our results point in an exciting direction bringing discriminative and generative model evaluation closer. We will release code and benchmark setup soon.
The Impact of Positional Encoding on Length Generalization in Transformers
Inkit Padhi
Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy
Payel Das
Length generalization, the ability to generalize from small training context sizes to larger ones, is a critical challenge in the developmen… (see more)t of Transformer-based language models. Positional encoding (PE) has been identified as a major factor influencing length generalization, but the exact impact of different PE schemes on extrapolation in downstream tasks remains unclear. In this paper, we conduct a systematic empirical study comparing the length generalization performance of decoder-only Transformers with five different position encoding approaches including Absolute Position Embedding (APE), T5's Relative PE, ALiBi, and Rotary, in addition to Transformers without positional encoding (NoPE). Our evaluation encompasses a battery of reasoning and mathematical tasks. Our findings reveal that the most commonly used positional encoding methods, such as ALiBi, Rotary, and APE, are not well suited for length generalization in downstream tasks. More importantly, NoPE outperforms other explicit positional encoding methods while requiring no additional computation. We theoretically demonstrate that NoPE can represent both absolute and relative PEs, but when trained with SGD, it mostly resembles T5's relative PE attention patterns. Finally, we find that scratchpad is not always helpful to solve length generalization and its format highly impacts the model's performance. Overall, our work suggests that explicit position embeddings are not essential for decoder-only Transformers to generalize well to longer sequences.
In-Context Learning for Text Classification with Many Labels
ROSA: Random Orthogonal Subspace Adaptation
Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models
Aarohi Srivastava
Abhinav Rastogi
Abhishek Rao
Abu Awal Md Shoeb
Abubakar Abid
Adam Fisch
Adam R. Brown
Adam Santoro
Aditya Gupta
Adrià Garriga-Alonso
Agnieszka Kluska
Aitor Lewkowycz
Akshat Agarwal
Alethea Power
Alex Ray
Alex Warstadt
Alexander W. Kocurek
Ali Safaya
Ali Tazarv
Alice Xiang … (see 432 more)
Alicia Parrish
Allen Nie
Aman Hussain
Amanda Askell
Amanda Dsouza
Ambrose Slone
Ameet Rahane
Anantharaman S. Iyer
Anders Johan Andreassen
Andrea Madotto
Andrea Santilli
Andreas Stuhlmüller
Andrew M. Dai
Andrew La
Andrew Lampinen
Andy Zou
Angela Jiang
Angelica Chen
Anh Vuong
Animesh Gupta
Anna Gottardi
Antonio Norelli
Anu Venkatesh
Arash Gholamidavoodi
Arfa Tabassum
Arul Menezes
Arun Kirubarajan
Asher Mullokandov
Ashish Sabharwal
Austin Herrick
Avia Efrat
Aykut Erdem
Ayla Karakaş
B. Ryan Roberts
Bao Sheng Loe
Barret Zoph
Bartłomiej Bojanowski
Batuhan Özyurt
Behnam Hedayatnia
Behnam Neyshabur
Benjamin Inden
Benno Stein
Berk Ekmekci
Bill Yuchen Lin
Blake Howald
Bryan Orinion
Cameron Diao
Cameron Dour
Catherine Stinson
Cedrick Argueta
Cesar Ferri
Chandan Singh
Charles Rathkopf
Chenlin Meng
Chitta Baral
Chiyu Wu
Chris Callison-Burch
Christopher Waites
Christian Voigt
Christopher D Manning
Christopher Potts
Cindy Ramirez
Clara E. Rivera
Clemencia Siro
Colin Raffel
Courtney Ashcraft
Cristina Garbacea
Damien Sileo
Dan Garrette
Dan Hendrycks
Dan Kilman
Dan Roth
C. Daniel Freeman
Daniel Khashabi
Daniel Moseguí González
Danielle Perszyk
Danny Hernandez
Danqi Chen
Daphne Ippolito
Dar Gilboa
David Dohan
David Drakard
David Jurgens
Debajyoti Datta
Deep Ganguli
Denis Emelin
Denis Kleyko
Deniz Yuret
Derek Chen
Derek Tam
Dieuwke Hupkes
Dilyar Buzan
Dimitri Coelho Mollo
Diyi Yang
Dong-Ho Lee
Dylan Schrader
Ekaterina Shutova
Ekin Dogus Cubuk
Elad Segal
Eleanor Hagerman
Elizabeth Barnes
Elizabeth Donoway
Ellie Pavlick
Emanuele Rodolà
Emma Lam
Eric Chu
Eric Tang
Erkut Erdem
Ernie Chang
Ethan A Chi
Ethan Dyer
Ethan Jerzak
Ethan Kim
Eunice Engefu Manyasi
Evgenii Zheltonozhskii
Fanyue Xia
Fatemeh Siar
Fernando Martínez-Plumed
Francesca Happé
François Chollet
Frieda Rong
Gaurav Mishra
Genta Indra Winata
Gerard de Melo
Germán Kruszewski
Giambattista Parascandolo
Giorgio Mariani
Gloria Xinyue Wang
Gonzalo Jaimovitch-Lopez
Gregor Betz
Guy Gur-Ari
Hana Galijasevic
Hannah Kim
Hannah Rashkin
Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Harsh Mehta
Hayden Bogar
Henry Shevlin
Henry Francis Anthony Shevlin
Hinrich Schuetze
Hiromu Yakura
Hongming Zhang
Hugh Mee Wong
Ian Ng
Isaac Noble
Jaap Jumelet
Jack Geissinger
Jackson Kernion
Jacob Hilton
Jaehoon Lee
Jaime Fernández Fisac
James B Simon
James Koppel
James Zheng
James Zou
Jan Kocon
Jana Thompson
Janelle Wingfield
Jared Kaplan
Jarema Radom
Jascha Sohl-Dickstein
Jason Phang
Jason Wei
Jekaterina Novikova
Jelle Bosscher
Jennifer Marsh
Jeremy Kim
Jeroen Taal
Jesse Engel
Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi
Jiacheng Xu
Jiaming Song
Jillian Tang
Joan Waweru
John Burden
John Miller
John U. Balis
Jonathan Batchelder
Jonathan Berant
Jörg Frohberg
Jos Rozen
Jose Hernandez-Orallo
Joseph Boudeman
Joseph Guerr
Joseph Jones
Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Joshua S. Rule
Joyce Chua
Kamil Kanclerz
Karen Livescu
Karl Krauth
Karthik Gopalakrishnan
Katerina Ignatyeva
Katja Markert
Kaustubh Dhole
Kevin Gimpel
Kevin Omondi
Kory Mathewson
Kristen Chiafullo
Ksenia Shkaruta
Kumar Shridhar
Kyle McDonell
Kyle Richardson
Laria Reynolds
Leo Gao
Ling Zhang
Liam Dugan
Lianhui Qin
Lidia Contreras-Ochando
Louis-Philippe Morency
Luca Moschella
Lucas Lam
Lucy Noble
Ludwig Schmidt
Luheng He
Luis Oliveros-Colón
Luke Metz
Lütfi Kerem Senel
Maarten Bosma
Maarten Sap
Maartje Ter Hoeve
Maheen Farooqi
Manaal Faruqui
Mantas Mazeika
Marco Baturan
Marco Marelli
Marco Maru
Maria Jose Ramirez-Quintana
Marie Tolkiehn
Mario Giulianelli
Martha Lewis
Martin Potthast
Matthew L Leavitt
Matthias Hagen
Mátyás Schubert
Medina Orduna Baitemirova
Melody Arnaud
Melvin McElrath
Michael Andrew Yee
Michael Cohen
Michael Gu
Michael Ivanitskiy
Michael Starritt
Michael Strube
Michał Swędrowski
Michele Bevilacqua
Michihiro Yasunaga
Mihir Kale
Mike Cain
Mimee Xu
Mirac Suzgun
Mitch Walker
Mo Tiwari
Mohit Bansal
Moin Aminnaseri
Mor Geva
Mozhdeh Gheini
Mukund Varma T
Nanyun Peng
Nathan Andrew Chi
Nayeon Lee
Neta Gur-Ari Krakover
Nicholas Cameron
Nicholas Roberts
Nick Doiron
Nicole Martinez
Nikita Nangia
Niklas Deckers
Niklas Muennighoff
Nitish Shirish Keskar
Niveditha S. Iyer
Noah Constant
Noah Fiedel
Nuan Wen
Oliver Zhang
Omar Agha
Omar Elbaghdadi
Omer Levy
Owain Evans
Pablo Antonio Moreno Casares
Parth Doshi
Pascale Fung
Paul Pu Liang
Paul Vicol
Pegah Alipoormolabashi
Peiyuan Liao
Percy Liang
Peter W Chang
Peter Eckersley
Phu Mon Htut
Pinyu Hwang
Pi-Bei Hwang
Piotr Miłkowski
Piyush Patil
Pouya Pezeshkpour
Priti Oli
Qiaozhu Mei
Qing Lyu
Qinlang Chen
Rabin Banjade
Rachel Etta Rudolph
Raefer Gabriel
Rahel Habacker
Ramon Risco
Raphaël Millière
Rhythm Garg
Richard Barnes
Rif A. Saurous
Riku Arakawa
Robbe Raymaekers
Robert Frank
Rohan Sikand
Roman Novak
Roman Sitelew
Ronan Le Bras
Rosanne Liu
Rowan Jacobs
Rui Zhang
Russ Salakhutdinov
Ryan Andrew Chi
Seungjae Ryan Lee
Ryan Stovall
Ryan Teehan
Rylan Yang
Sahib Singh
Saif Mohammad
Sajant Anand
Sam Dillavou
Sam Shleifer
Sam Wiseman
Samuel Gruetter
Samuel R. Bowman
Samuel Stern Schoenholz
Sanghyun Han
Sanjeev Kwatra
Sarah A. Rous
Sarik Ghazarian
Sayan Ghosh
Sean Casey
Sebastian Bischoff
Sebastian Gehrmann
Sebastian Schuster
Sepideh Sadeghi
Shadi Hamdan
Sharon Zhou
Shashank Srivastava
Sherry Shi
Shikhar Singh
Shima Asaadi
Shixiang Shane Gu
Shubh Pachchigar
Shubham Toshniwal
Shyam Upadhyay
Shyamolima Shammie Debnath
Siamak Shakeri
Simon Thormeyer
Simone Melzi
Sneha Priscilla Makini
Soo-Hwan Lee
Spencer Torene
Sriharsha Hatwar
Stanislas Dehaene
Stefan Divic
Stefano Ermon
Stella Biderman
Stephanie Lin
Stephen Prasad
Steven Piantadosi
Stuart Shieber
Summer Misherghi
Svetlana Kiritchenko
Swaroop Mishra
Tal Linzen
Tal Schuster
Tao Li
Tao Yu
Tariq Ali
Tatsunori Hashimoto
Te-Lin Wu
Théo Desbordes
Theodore Rothschild
Thomas Phan
Tianle Wang
Tiberius Nkinyili
Timo Schick
Timofei Kornev
Titus Tunduny
Tobias Gerstenberg
Trenton Chang
Trishala Neeraj
Tushar Khot
Tyler Shultz
Uri Shaham
Vedant Misra
Vera Demberg
Victoria Nyamai
Vikas Raunak
Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh
vinay uday prabhu
Vishakh Padmakumar
Vivek Srikumar
William Fedus
William Saunders
Wout Vossen
Xiang Ren
Xiaoyu Tong
Xinran Zhao
Xinyi Wu
Xudong Shen
Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh
Yair Lakretz
Yangqiu Song
Yasaman Bahri
Yejin Choi
Yichi Yang
Sophie Hao
Yiding Hao
Yifu Chen
Yonatan Belinkov
Yufang Hou
Yuntao Bai
Zachary Seid
Zhuoye Zhao
Zijian Wang
Zijie J. Wang
Zirui Wang
Ziyi Wu
Combining Parameter-efficient Modules for Task-level Generalisation
A modular design encourages neural models to disentangle and recombine different facets of knowledge to generalise more systematically to ne… (see more)w tasks. In this work, we assume that each task is associated with a subset of latent skills from an (arbitrary size) inventory. In turn, each skill corresponds to a parameter-efficient (sparse / low-rank) model adapter. By jointly learning adapters and a routing function that allocates skills to each task, the full network is instantiated as the average of the parameters of active skills. We propose several inductive biases that encourage re-usage and composition of the skills, including variable-size skill allocation and a dual-speed learning rate. We evaluate our latent-skill model in two main settings: 1) multitask reinforcement learning for instruction following on 8 levels of the BabyAI platform; and 2) few-shot fine-tuning of language models on 160 NLP tasks of the CrossFit benchmark. We find that the modular design of our network enhances sample efficiency in reinforcement learning and few-shot generalisation in supervised learning, compared to a series of baselines. These include models where parameters are fully shared, task-specific, conditionally generated (HyperFormer), or sparse mixture-of-experts (TaskMoE).
MAGNIFICo: Evaluating the In-Context Learning Ability of Large Language Models to Generalize to Novel Interpretations
StarCoder: may the source be with you!
Raymond Li
Loubna Ben allal
Yangtian Zi
Niklas Muennighoff
Denis Kocetkov
Chenghao Mou
Marc Marone
Christopher Akiki
Jia LI
Jenny Chim
Qian Liu
Evgenii Zheltonozhskii
Terry Yue Zhuo
Thomas Wang
Olivier Dehaene
Mishig Davaadorj
Joel Lamy-Poirier
Joao Monteiro
Oleh Shliazhko
Nicolas Gontier … (see 47 more)
Armel Zebaze
Ming-Ho Yee
Logesh Kumar Umapathi
Jian Zhu
Ben Lipkin
Muhtasham Oblokulov
Zhiruo Wang
Rudra Murthy
Jason T Stillerman
Siva Sankalp Patel
Dmitry Abulkhanov
Marco Zocca
Zhihan Zhang
N. Fahmy
Urvashi Bhattacharyya
Wenhao Yu
Swayam Singh
Paulo Villegas
M. Kunakov
Fedor Zhdanov
Manuel Romero
Tony Lee
Nadav Timor
Jennifer Ding
Claire S Schlesinger
Hailey Schoelkopf
Jan Ebert
Tri Dao
Mayank Mishra
Alex Gu
Jennifer Robinson
Carolyn Jane Anderson
Brendan Dolan-Gavitt
Danish Contractor
Daniel Fried
Yacine Jernite
Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis
Sean Hughes
Thomas Wolf
Arjun Guha
Leandro Von Werra
The BigCode community, an open-scientific collaboration working on the responsible development of Large Language Models for Code (Code LLMs)… (see more), introduces StarCoder and StarCoderBase: 15.5B parameter models with 8K context length, infilling capabilities and fast large-batch inference enabled by multi-query attention. StarCoderBase is trained on 1 trillion tokens sourced from The Stack, a large collection of permissively licensed GitHub repositories with inspection tools and an opt-out process. We fine-tuned StarCoderBase on 35B Python tokens, resulting in the creation of StarCoder. We perform the most comprehensive evaluation of Code LLMs to date and show that StarCoderBase outperforms every open Code LLM that supports multiple programming languages and matches or outperforms the OpenAI code-cushman-001 model. Furthermore, StarCoder outperforms every model that is fine-tuned on Python and still retains its performance on other programming languages. We take several important steps towards a safe open-access model release, including an improved PII redaction pipeline and a novel attribution tracing tool, and make the StarCoder models publicly available under a more commercially viable version of the Open Responsible AI Model license.