uclanlp

UCLA Natural Language Processing Research #NLProc

[Wenbo Hu@CVPR 2026 @gordonhu608]

Our 2nd 3D-LLM/VLA Workshop is happening Tomorrow (June 3) at Room 1CD starting 1pm!

For more info and time slot of each speaker, please refer to our website: https://t.co/C3SCv1PWXU

#CVPR2026
@CVPR

[Po-Nien Kung @P_N_Kung]

🌟 Excited to share Ctrl-R, accepted as an ICML 2026 Spotlight!

Specify a target reasoning structure, Ctrl-R can enforce it during rollout, and retain accurate importance-sampling weights for principled policy optimization.

paper: https://t.co/3OEldcjJld
🧵[1/5]

[Yining Hong @yining_hong]

Meet Embodied Web Agents that bridge physical-digital realms. Imagine embodied agents that can search for online recipes, shop for ingredients and cook for you. Embodied web agents search internet information for implementing real-world embodied tasks.

All data, codes and web environments are available at https://t.co/lJnWeUNlPC
Paper link: https://t.co/SOOpV4yzTa

[Wenbo Hu@CVPR 2026 @gordonhu608]

Does GRPO handle multiple-task advantage normalization effectively? 🤔
🚀We introduce Gaussian GRPO (G²RPO), a novel method that mathematically forcing the advantage distribution of any given task to strictly converge to a standard normal distribution. G²RPO provides:
✅1) intrinsic robustness to outliers,
✅2) symmetric updates for positive and negative rewards,
✅3) uniform variance across diverse tasks.

We adopt G²RPO and task-level response length and entropy shaping which leads to OpenVLThinkerV2!
🏆A new model with SOTA open-source visual reasoning and perception performance among the similar size models.
(1/n)👇

#VLM #LLM #Multimodal #RL #GRPO

[Kuan-Hao Huang @kuanhaoh_]

The first-ever Texas NLP Symposium wrapped up yesterday! 🎉🎉🎉 Huge thanks to all the speakers and attendees for making it a huge success. I hope everyone had a great time. Stay tuned for info on next year!
#TexasNLP

Check photos and highlights here: https://t.co/wYPJqhbkps

[Laude Institute @LaudeInstitute]

Accelerating Science track: A century of scientific progress in one decade - that's the target.

👑Accelerating the Queen of Sciences, @UCLA
Teaching AI to wonder, conjecture, and discover the way a mathematician does. Every hard science benefits if this works.
@sahaiamit @kaiwei_chang Raghu Meka @VioletNPeng @terrence_tao @WeiWang1973

🌦️Actionable AI Weather Forecasts for Developing Economies, @UChicago
Open-source AI weather forecasting infrastructure for developing economies, with millions of farmers already reached with better monsoon forecasts.
@WillettBecca @ianfoster @turbulentjet Michael Kremer

[Kai-Wei Chang @kaiwei_chang]

Excited to work with a world-class team (@sahaiamit, Raghu Meka,@VioletNPeng,@terrence_tao,@WeiWang1973) on AI for math discovery and thank @LaudeInstitute for the support. I'm hiring a postdoc in this direction. Please contact me by May 1, 2026, if you’re interested.

[Kai-Wei Chang @kaiwei_chang]

Are all suicide deaths documented equally in national surveillance data? Across 300,000+ National Violent Death Reporting System narrative summaries of suicide incidents, we find that Black non-Hispanic decedents have shorter, less complex summaries than white non-Hispanic decedents, pointing to an urgent need for data equity measures in public health reporting. Full findings in the paper — link below 📷 https://t.co/B7s98txwnU

With @christinachanc @arsenievK @drvickiemays & Susan D. Cochran

[uclanlp @uclanlp]

For the UCLA NLP seminar talk this Friday, we are thrilled to host Prof. Christopher Potts @ChrisGPotts from Stanford @stanfordnlp !

Title: “The Archai of Palimpsestic Memorization”

When: 2–3 PM (PST), Friday, Jan 23

Registration: https://t.co/8n3ADScqCQ

[Himanshu Kumar @codewithimanshu]

@kaiwei_chang Wow, 5 papers at NeurIPS, Kai-Wei! That's impressive, but is AI for Math really the future, or just hype?

[uclanlp @uclanlp]

For this Friday’s UCLA NLP seminar talk, we are excited to host Prof. Sherry Yang @sherryyangML from @NYU_Courant and @GoogleDeepMind :

Title: Learning World Models and Agents for High-Cost Environments

Time: 2-3PM, Friday, Nov 21th (PST)

Registration: https://t.co/kt7kjOmgTv

[uclanlp @uclanlp]

For this week’s NLP seminar talk, we are thrilled to host Prof. Arman Cohan @armancohan from Yale @Yale and Ai2 aitanaallenperez on LLM evaluation and alignment:

Time: 2-3PM, Friday, Nov 14th (PST)

Registration: https://t.co/pKSy1vCJkL

[Violet Peng @VioletNPeng]

It’s a wrap! I hope y’all enjoyed #EMNLP25 as much as I did! Big shoutout to the photography team! All my photos in this post are taking from their websites. To all attendees: you should check out if you haven’t already!!

[uclanlp @uclanlp]

@VioletNPeng served as the Program Co-Chair for #EMNLP25, one of the largest NLP conferences, which received over 8,000 submissions and drew 6,000 participants.

[Haoyi Qiu @HaoyiQiu]

🤖💬AI agents can be easily persuaded (like Anthropic’s Claudius often giving discounts).

🤔Previous study on persuasion has been exclusively on text-only modality. We wonder: are AI agents more susceptible when presented with multimodal content?

Introducing MMPersuade, a comprehensive multimodal benchmark that assesses AI agents’ susceptibility to established persuasion principles, covering commercial, subjective and behavioral, and adversarial contexts.

[uclanlp @uclanlp]

Do visuals make persuasion stronger?

𝗠𝗠𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗱𝗲 explores how multimodal evidence changes what AI agents believe 👀

[Haoyi Qiu @HaoyiQiu]

🤖💬AI agents can be easily persuaded (like Anthropic’s Claudius often giving discounts).

🤔Previous study on persuasion has been exclusively on text-only modality. We wonder: are AI agents more susceptible when presented with multimodal content?

Introducing MMPersuade, a comprehensive multimodal benchmark that assesses AI agents’ susceptibility to established persuasion principles, covering commercial, subjective and behavioral, and adversarial contexts.

[uclanlp @uclanlp]

For this week’s UCLA NLP seminar, we are thrilled to invite Prof. Rose Yu @yuqirose from UCSD @UCSanDiego:

Talk Title: “Towards AI Co-Scientists: Agentic Foundation Models for Physical Universe”

Time: 2-3PM, Friday, October 31st (PDT)

Registration: https://t.co/xu0TiggF66

[I-Hung Hsu @IHung_Hsu]

Have you ever wondered how to build target-language LMs most efficiently? 🤨

Will finetuning from other multilingual LMs help? No curse of multilinguality?? See the snapshot below for the answer.

What about transferring data to help? What languages help? See our new paper! 👇

[Shayne Longpre @ShayneRedford]

📢Thrilled to introduce ATLAS 🗺️: scaling laws beyond English, for pretraining, finetuning, and the curse of multilinguality.

The largest public, multilingual scaling study to-date—we ran 774 exps (10M-8B params, 400+ languages) to answer:

🌍Are scaling laws different by language?

🧙‍♂️Can we model the curse of multilinguality?

⚖️Pretrain from scratch or finetune from multilingual checkpoint?

🔀Cross-lingual transfer scores for 1444 lang pairs?

1/🧵

[uclanlp @uclanlp]

We’ve been running the UCLA NLP Seminar for a while now and realized it’s a waste not to share these amazing talks more broadly.
So here’s our YouTube channel now!
🎥 Watch and subscribe to our channel for past and upcoming sessions:
👉 https://t.co/dbGIRMAAS4
#AI #UCLANLP