Mohit Bansal

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Mohit Bansal

Parker Distinguished Professor

Director, MURGe-Lab (UNC-AI Group)
PECASE Fellow, AAAI Fellow
Lead (Core AI), ENGAGE NSF-AI Institute Computer Science Dept., UNC Chapel Hill
FB250, 201 S Columbia St, Chapel Hill
mbansal -atsign- cs . unc . edu
Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Twitter


Recent Invited Talks/Keynotes:

News:

  • (06/25)    Congrats for job placements to postdocs/PhD students: Elias Stengel-Eskin: UT Austin CS faculty; Jaehong Yoon: NTU Singapore faculty; Jaemin Cho: JHU CS faculty; Jialu Li: Adobe Research Scientist; Yi-Lin Sung: Meta Research Scientist; Prateek Yadav: Meta Research Scientist.
  • (06/25)    12 new publications in ICCV, ACL, ICML, CVPR, TMLR, TACL on occlusion understanding in VLMs, instructional video editing/reasoning, state-adaptive MoE-based VL-navigation, model merging at scale, multi-attribute steering of LLMs, localized attribution in content-grounded generation, self-consistency preference optimization, tree-based representation for long video reasoning, motion-grounded video reasoning, factual diverse generation via asymptotic entropy, model MoErging, and compression for communicating parameter-efficient updates.
  • (03/25)    Congrats to Archiki Prasad for the Apple AI/ML PhD Fellowship!
  • (01/25)    11 new publications in ICLR 2025 (incl. a top-1.8% 'oral' and top-5% 'spotlight') on data generation environments/agents/policies, adapting diverse controls to diffusion models, balancing fast and slow planning, multimodal compositional+modular video reasoning, lifelong multimodal instruction tuning via dynamic data selection, safe T2I/T2V generation, generative infinite games, procedural+predictive video representation learning, bootstrapping language-guided navigation learning, automated preference data synthesis, and diagnosing cultural bias of VLMs.
  • (01/25)    5 new publications in NAACL 2025 on balancing agents' persuasion resistance+acceptance, adaptive decoding to balance contextual+parametric knowledge conflicts, reverse thinking for stronger LLM reasoning, positional bias of faithfulness for long-form summarization, and improving generation faithfulness via multi-agent collaboration.
  • (01/25)    Honored and humbled to be selected as a AAAI Fellow -- all the credit belongs to my amazing past and current students+postdocs+collaborators!
  • (01/25)    Honored and humbled to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Award by the US White House and President (was nominated in 2019, and awarded ARO-ECASE funding in 2021 as a `bridge program' due to White House PECASE announcement delays).
  • (11/24)    Congrats to David Wan for the Google PhD Fellowship!
  • (11/24)    7 new publications in NeurIPS 2024 and TMLR on agent confidence calibration via speaker-listener pragmatics, merging skill-specific text-to-image experts, game-theoretic LLM evaluation, model editing and rational belief revision, unlearning in multimodal LLMs, vision-language-navigation survey, and efficient multimodal generation.
  • (07/24)    4 new publications in COLM 2024 and ECCV 2024 on adaptive/dynamic environment generation, long multi-scene consistent and fine-grained layout control for video generation, diagram generation via LLM planning, and contrastive region guidance for VLM grounding.
  • (06/24)    Congrats for job placements to PhD students: Peter Hase: Anthropic Residency; Yichen Jiang: Apple AI/ML Research Scientist; Adyasha Maharana: Databricks/Mosaic Research Scientist; Swarnadeep Saha: FAIR-Meta Research Scientist.
  • (05/24)    12 new publications in ICML 2024 and ACL 2024 on multi-agent reasoning collaboration, inducing systematicity in transformers, easy-to=hard generalization, very long conversational memory of LLM agents, soft self-consistency, fine-grained hallucination evaluation, structured distillation of multi-agent reasoning interaction graphs, refactoring programs to discover abstractions, etc.
  • (04/24)    Congrats to Jaemin Cho for the Bloomberg PhD Fellowship!
  • (04/24)    Program Co-chairing for EMNLP 2024. We welcome everyone to submit their papers. Looking forward to welcoming you in Miami Nov12-16!
  • (03/24)    11 new publications in CVPR 2024 (incl. a 'spotlight') and NAACL 2024 and TMLR 2024 and EACL 2024 on interleaved+interactive any-to-any generation, alternating unimodal adaptation, interactive image segmentation, branch-solve-merge for LLM eval+generation, as-needed decomposition and planning with LLM agents, aspect-controlled referring expression generation, model merging by task subspace matching, low-cost algorithmic recourse, unified embeddings for multimodal retrieval, and hierarchical+dynamic prompt compression.
  • (01/24)    7 new publications (incl. 2 'spotlights') in ICLR 2024 on attack vs. defense for sensitive information deletion in LLMs, Davidsonian Semantics Scene Graphs for reliable T2I evaluation, data pruning with balanced diversity and difficulty, rephrase-based visual question grounding for VLMs, efficient sparse mixture-of-experts, efficient coarse-to-fine pruning for VLMs, analyzing and mitigating hallucinations in VLMs.
  • (10/23)    Honored and humbled to receive the IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award.
  • (10/23)    6 new publications in EMNLP 2023 on reasoning chain/chain-of-thoughts evaluation, context dependency in language generation, data factors for compositional generalization, summary generation with controllable readability levels, multimodal model merging, and causal debiasing of multimodal models.
  • (09/23)    9 new publications (including 2 'spotlights') in NeurIPS 2023 on visual programming for interpretable+explainable text-to-image generation and evaluation, any-to-any multimodal generation, LLMs teaching student models, panorama generation for VLN generalization, model merging with interference, localization informing model editing, self-chained videoQA and localization, action knowledge in video-language LLMs, adaptive contextual perception.
  • (07/23)    3 new publications (including 1 'oral') in ICCV 2023 on text-to-image skill+bias evaluation, scaling VLN, and unified coarse-to-fine alignment for video-text retrieval.
  • (06/23)    Postdocs Elias Stengel-Eskin and Jaehong Yoon joining us!
  • (05/23)    11 new papers in ACL 2023 and IJCAI 2023 and *SEM 2023 on faithful extractive summarization, meeting QA, single-frame bias in VidL, mixed fwd/rev cross-entropy, multimodal graph script induction, continual learning for code generation, exclusive supermasks for CL, modular multi-step reasoning, factuality of LLMs, sequential instruction understanding, and compositional LM differentiable prompting.
  • (02/23)    13 new papers in CVPR 2023 and ICLR 2023 and EACL 2023 and WACV 2023 on unified vision-text-layout DocAI, VLN with future-view semantics, hierarchical retrieval and step captioning, video-language pretraining, parameter-efficient audio-visual adapters, summarization programs, faithful decoding, edit-based prompt search, model belief graphs, social commonsense, multi-doc summarization + graph IE, long-distance video QA, perceiver-VL.
  • (12/22)    Congrats to Zineng Tang for being selected as winner of the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award 2023!
  • (10/22)    New papers in EMNLP 2022 and COLING 2022 and TACL on multimodal summarization + factuality, explanation hardness, mutual exclusivity for compositionality, action learning in interactive visual environments, LM bias, multimodal coreference in multi-turn dialogue, graph generative commonsense reasoning, and survey on data augmentation for limited data learning.
  • (09/22)    Congrats to Swarnadeep Saha for the Google PhD Fellowship!
  • (09/22)    New papers (including 3 selected/featured 'orals') in NeurIPS 2022 and ECCV 2022 on textless VL transformers, visual feature importance, ladder side-tuning, LLMs as fewshot video learners, T-few/IA3, gamified VL association benchmark, text to visual story generation, efficient video retrieval via audio replacement, etc.
  • (06/22)    New papers in NAACL 2022 on factual summarization pretraining, factuality evaluation, scene imagination commonsense, multilingual vision-lang-navigation, fine-grained CLIP captioning, masked POS modeling, curriculum learning, video intent discovery, multi-doc summarization clustering, interactive summarization, etc.
  • (05/22)    Promoted to full professor.
  • (03/22)    Congrats to Yichen Jiang for the Apple AI/ML PhD Fellowship!
  • (03/22)    New papers in CVPR 2022 and ACL 2022 on environment image editing for VLN generalization, vision-language parameter-efficient adapters, Cherokee revitalization NLP roadmap, explanation graph contrastive learning, and predicting human opinion distributions for NLI.
  • (12/21)    Congrats to Shiyue Zhang for the Bloomberg PhD Fellowship!
  • (11/21)    Congrats to Ori+Ram and team on the CoNLL 2021 Best Paper Runner-Up Award!
  • (09/21)    New papers in NeurIPS 2021 on video-to-language knowledge distillation, query-based video highlight/saliency, socially-aligned feature importance explanations, video-lang understanding multi-task benchmark.
  • (09/21)    Congrats to Peter Hase for the Google PhD Fellowship! (article)
  • (08/21)    New papers in EMNLP 2021 on structure/compositionality, generalization, evaluation, and efficiency for explainability, commonsense, navigation, story visualization, and summarization.
  • (07/21)    Thanks to NSF for funding our ENGAGE NSF-AI Institute! (article)
  • (06/21)    Congrats to Jie and co-authors on the CVPR 2021 Best Student Paper Honorable Mention!
  • (05/21)    New papers in ICML 2021 and ACL 2021 on unified vision-language generation, email thread summarization, continuous flow generation, multilingual video retrieval, dialogue-contradictions, cross-modal fake news detection, code generation, cherokee interactive demo, and chat disentaglement.
  • (04/21)    Congrats to Xiang and co-authors on the EACL 2021 Best Long Paper Award Honorable Mention!
  • (04/21)    New papers in NAACL 2021 on multi-proof generation, consistent visual story generation, localized video-language pretraining, syntactic vision-language navigation, dynamic benchmarking, tensor-product summarization, graph-based multi-doc summarization, and interactive multi-doc summarization, and robustness gym.
  • (03/21)    Congrats to Jie Lei for the Adobe Research Fellowship!
  • (03/21)    Honored and humbled to receive the Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (ECASE) by ARO!
  • (02/21)    New papers in AAAI 2021, EACL 2021, and CVPR 2021 on pose-correction captioning, query-focused multi-doc summarization, commonsense graph-task matching, unreliable news detection, and efficient video-language pretraining.
  • (12/20)    Hao's work on vokenization covered in MIT Technology Review.
  • (09/20)    New papers in EMNLP 2020 on datasets (e.g., Cherokee MT, navigation+assembly, conjunctive/distributional NLI, manyhop-fact-verification) and methods (e.g., vokenization, proof generation, leakage-simulatability).
  • (08/20)    Thanks to UNC for the UNC Phillip & Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement.
  • (05/20)    Thanks to IJCAI for the `IJCAI Early Career Spotlight'.
  • (04/20)    8 new papers (6 in ACL 2020, 1 in IJCAI 2020, and 1 in ECCV 2020).
  • (02/20)    Thanks to Amazon for the Amazon Machine Learning Research Award (blog post).
  • (01/20)    Thanks to DARPA for the DARPA Director's Fellowship.
  • (01/20)    Thanks to Microsoft for the Microsoft Investigator Fellowship (MSR blog post).
  • (12/19)    Congrats to Sweta Karlekar and Han Guo for winning the Runner-Up and Finalist positions in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards! (link)
  • (11/19)    5 new papers in AAAI 2020 and ICRA 2020.
  • (08/19)    Congrats to Peter Hase for the Royster Society PhD Fellowship!
  • (08/19)    5 new papers in EMNLP 2019.
  • (07/19)    Thanks to NSF for the NSF-CAREER Award (details).
  • (07/19)    Thanks to Google AI for the Google Focused Research Award (details).
  • (06/19)    Congrats to Hao Tan for the Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellowship!
  • (05/19)    6 new papers in ACL 2019 (congrats to Hyounghun for best paper nomination) and 2 new preprints.
  • (04/19)    Congrats to Darryl Hannan for the 3-year NSF PhD Fellowship!
  • (02/19)    5 new papers: 3 in NAACL 2019, 1 in CVPR 2019, 1 in ICRA 2019.
  • (01/19)    Congrats to Ramakanth Pasunuru for the 2-year Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship (and finalist for Facebook PhD Fellowship)!
  • (12/18)    Congrats to Han Guo for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Honorable Mention!
  • (11/18)    Thanks to research awards from Salesforce, Facebook, and IBM.
  • (10/18)    2 new papers in AAAI 2019 (16% acceptance rate).
  • (08/18)    7 new papers (6 in EMNLP; 1 in CoNLL -- see below).
  • (07/18)    Thanks to Army Research Office for the ARO Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award.
  • (07/18)    1st rank in EMNLP FEVER (Fact Extraction & VERification) shared task (congrats Yixin, Haonan)! [Press Article]
  • (06/18)    COLING paper on dynamic-MTL selected as "Area Chair Favorites" (congrats Han+Ram)!
  • (04/18)    4 new papers (2 in ACL; 1 in TACL; 1 in WiNLP -- see below).
  • (04/18)    Congrats to Lisa Bauer for the 3-year NSF PhD Fellowship!
  • (03/18)    Thanks to Adobe for the Adobe Research Award.
  • (02/18)    9 new 2018 papers in NAACL, CVPR, AAAI, WACV (see below).
  • (09/17)    Thanks to DARPA for the DARPA Young Faculty Award (link).
  • (09/17)    Thanks to Facebook for the Facebook ParlAI Research Award.
  • (06/17)    Top single model results on the RepEval-NLI Shared Task at EMNLP 2017 (congrats Yixin!).
  • (06/17)    Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2017 (congrats Ram!).
  • (02/17)    Thanks to Google for a Google Faculty Research Award (link).
  • (07/16)    Best paper award at ACL 2016 Repl4NLP workshop for paper on mapping unseen words.
  • (03/16)    Thanks to Bloomberg for a Bloomberg Data Science Research Grant (link).
  • (02/16)    Paper on universal sentence embeddings selected as an oral at ICLR 2016.
  • (01/16)    Our work on AI for computational humor was covered in MIT Technology Review and Newsweek.
  • (11/15)    Nvidia paper award at NIPS 2015 Multimodal ML workshop for paper on navigational instruction following.
  • (12/14)    Thanks for an IBM Faculty Award and a Google Faculty Research Award (link).

I am looking for motivated PhD students & postdocs in NLP, ML, multimodal AI: [Info for Prospective Students (2025)] [Department's Why-UNC Page]

Postdoc Opening (new 2024): [link]

About

Dr. Mohit Bansal is the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor and the Director of the MURGe-Lab (UNC-AI Group) in the Computer Science department at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of California at Berkeley (where he was advised by Dan Klein) and his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 2008. His research expertise is in multimodal generative models, reasoning and planning agents, faithful language generation, and interpretable, efficient, and generalizable deep learning. He is a AAAI Fellow and recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award, DARPA Director's Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, Google Focused Research Award, Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, Army Young Investigator Award (YIP), DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), and outstanding paper awards at ACL, CVPR, EACL, COLING, CoNLL, and TMLR. He has been a keynote speaker for the ECAI 2025, ACM-CODS 2025, AACL-IJCNLP 2023, CoNLL 2023, and INLG 2022 conferences. His service includes EMNLP Program Co-Chair, CoNLL Program Co-Chair, and ACL Executive Committee, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee, ACL Doctoral Dissertation Award Organizer, ACL Americas Sponsorship Co-Chair, and Associate/Action Editor for TACL, CL, IEEE/ACM TASLP, and CSL journals.

Work Experience

Computer Science department, UNC Chapel Hill (2016 — present)
John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professorship
Director, MURGe-Lab (UNC-NLP Group)
Full Professor 2022-present
Associate Professor: 2020-2022
Assistant Professor: 2016-2020

Toyota Technological Institute, Chicago (2013 — 2016)
Research Assistant Professor

EECS, UC Berkeley (2008 — 2013)
Graduate Student Researcher (Advisor: Dan Klein)

Google Research, Mountain View (Summer 2011)
Research Intern (with John DeNero and Dekang Lin)

Microsoft Research, Redmond (Summer 2010)
Research Intern (with Chris Quirk and Bob Moore)

Cornell University, Ithaca (Summer 2007)
Research Intern (with Lillian Lee and Claire Cardie)

Selected Awards/Honors

AAAI Fellow, 2025.

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), 2025.
(nominated in 2019, and awarded ARO-ECASE funding in 2021 as a `bridge program' due to White House PECASE announcement delays).

TMLR Outstanding Paper Finalist, 2024.

Provost's Kenan Senior Faculty Research and Scholarly Leave Award, 2023-2024.

IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award, 2023.

Keynote Speaker, CoNLL, 2023.

Keynote Speaker, AACL, 2023.

Keynote Speaker, INLG, 2022.

Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (ECASE), Army Research Office, 2021.

CoNLL Best Paper Runner-Up Award, 2021.

CVPR Best Student Paper Honorable Mention, 2021.

EACL Best Long Paper Award Honorable Mention, 2021.

UNC Phillip & Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, 2020.

IJCAI Early Career Spotlight, 2020 (previous years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019)

John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professorship, 2020

DARPA Director's Fellowship, 2019

Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, 2019

Amazon Machine Learning Research Award, 2019

NSF-CAREER Award, 2019

Google Focused Research Award, 2019

ACL Best Short Paper Nomination, 2019

Salesforce Research Deep Learning Grant, 2018

Facebook Faculty Research Award, 2018

IBM Faculty Award, 2018

Army Research Office Young Investigator Award (ARO-YIP), 2018

COLING 'Area Chair Favorites' Paper Award, 2018

Adobe Faculty Research Award, 2018

Verisk AI Faculty Research Award, 2018

DARPA Young Faculty Award (DARPA-YFA), 2017

Facebook ParlAI Faculty Research Award, 2017

ACL Outstanding Paper Award, 2017

Google Faculty Research Award, 2016

Best Paper Award, ACL Representation Learning for NLP Workshop, 2016

Bloomberg Data Science Research Grant, 2016

NVidia Paper Award, NIPS Multimodal Machine Learning Workshop, 2015

Google Faculty Research Award, 2014

IBM Faculty Award, 2014

ACL Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, 2014

Best/Outstanding Reviewer Award, COLING 2018, NAACL 2018, NAACL 2015, EMNLP 2012

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley, 2011

Tong Leong Lim Pre-Doctoral Prize, EECS, UC Berkeley, 2011

Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, 2011

Student Fellowships/Awards:

Apple AI/ML PhD Fellowship, 2025 (Archiki Prasad)

Google PhD Fellowship, 2024 (David Wan)

Bloomberg PhD Fellowship, 2024 (David Wan) (declined)

Bloomberg PhD Fellowship, 2023 (Jaemin Cho)

CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Winner 2023 (Zineng Tang)

Google NLP PhD Fellowship, 2022 (Swarnadeep Saha)

Apple AI/ML PhD Fellowship, 2022 (Yichen Jiang)

Bloomberg PhD Fellowship, 2021 (Shiyue Zhang)

Google PhD Fellowship, 2021 (Peter Hase)

Adobe Research Fellowship, 2021 (Jie Lei)

Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, 2019 (Ramakanth Pasunuru)

Facebook PhD Fellowship Finalist, 2019 (Ramakanth Pasunuru)

Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellowship, 2019 (Hao Tan)

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2018 (Lisa Bauer)

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2019 (Darryl Hannan)

Royster Society Kenan Fellowship, 2019 (Peter Hase)

CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Runner-Up, 2020 (Sweta Karlekar)

CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Honorable Mention, 2019 (Han Guo)

CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Finalist, 2020 (Han Guo

Other Funding/Grants:

NIH Advancing Health Research through Multimodal AI (UNC Co-PI)

DARPA Environment-driven Conceptual Learning (ECOLE) (UNC PI)

ONR Science of Artificial Intelligence – Basic and Applied Research for the Naval Domain (Overall PI)

NSF-AI Institute on Engaged Learning (Core AI Lead; UNC PI)

NSF Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (UNC Co-PI)

ONR Advancing Artificial Intelligence for the Naval Domain (UNC PI)

DARPA Machine Common Sense (MCS) (UNC PI)

DARPA Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas (KAIROS) (UNC PI)

NSF-NIH SCH AURA Connecting Audio and Radio Sensing Systems to Improve Care at Home (UNC Co-PI)

Publications (+Code/Data)

Teaching/Talks

Instructor, COMP590/790: Multimodal AI: Connecting Language to Vision and Robotics, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2025.

Instructor, COMP590/790: Connecting Language to Vision and Robotics, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2023.

Instructor, COMP590/790: Connecting Language to Vision and Robotics, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2021.

Instructor, COMP786: Natural Language Processing, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2020.

Instructor, First-Year Undergraduate Honors Seminar: Special Topics: Human and Artificial Intelligence Through the Prism of Language, Fall 2019.

Instructor, Advanced Topics in NLP: Recent Progress in Different Learning Paradigms, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2019.

Instructor, Advanced Topics in NLP: Conversational Models, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2018.

Instructor, Graduate Natural Language Processing, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2017.

Instructor, Advanced Topics in NLP: Language Grounding for Robotics, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2017.

Instructor, Seminar on Natural Language Processing, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2016.

Guest Lecturer, Computational Linguistics (Instructor: John Goldsmith), University of Chicago, Spring 2015.

Guest Lecturer, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (Instructor: Matthew Walter), TTI-Chicago, University of Chicago, Spring 2015.

Guest Lecturer, Visual Recognition with Text (Instructor: Sanja Fidler), University of Toronto, Winter 2015 — short course on 'Topics, Trends, and Resources in NLP' [slides].

Grad Student Instructor, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Instructor: Dan Klein), UC Berkeley, Fall 2011. Received an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award by UC Berkeley for excellence in teaching.

Grad Student Instructor, Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence (Instructors: Pieter Abbeel, Dan Klein, Jitendra Malik), UC Berkeley, Spring 2009. Sole TA for new course with 30 advanced students.

Recent Invited Talks/Keynotes:

Keynote, 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), 2025

Distinguished Lecture Series, MSU

Keynote, Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD) 2025

Distinguished Lecture Series, GMU

Keynote, NLP@Michigan Day, 2025

Distinguished Lecture Series, StonyBrook [New: 'Planning Agents for Collaborative Reasoning and Multimodal Generation']

Distinguished Speaker Series, USF

Keynote, Amazon Research Days

Keynote, TTIC Multimodal AI Workshop

Keynote, Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS) 2024

Keynote, 12th International Advanced Summer School on NLP (IASNLP-2024)

Invited Speaker, 1st Korea NLP/LM Workshop

Keynote, Pinterest Labs ML Symposium 2024

Keynote, Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS) 2024

Distinguished Lecture Series, USC ['Multimodal Generative Models: Unification, Planning Agents, Evaluation']

Keynote, SouthNLP Symposium 2024

Invited Speaker, IndoML 2023

IISc Bangalore (Kotak AI-ML Centre)

Keynote, 27th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2023) ['Multimodal Generative LLMs: Unification, Interpretability, Evaluation': video]

Invited Speaker, TTIC 20th Anniversary Celebration

Keynote, AACL-IJCNLP 2023

Penn State NLP Colloquium Series

Auburn AI Distinguished Speaker Series, 2023

TWIML AI Podcast: 'Unifying Vision and Language Models'

ACL 2023 Narrative Understanding Workshop

CVPR 2023 Explainable AI for Computer Vision (XAI4CV) Workshop

IBM Neuro-Symbolic AI Workshop 2023 ['Modeling and Evaluating Faithful Generation in Language (and Vision)']

MBZUAI AI Quorum's Inaugural NLP Symposium ['Unified and Efficient Vision-and-Language Modeling': video]

UT Austin Forum for Artificial Intelligence

Stanford NLP Seminar

Open Data Science Conference

ICML 2022 Pre-training Workshop ['Unified and Efficient Multimodal Pretraining Across Vision and Language': video]

Keynote, 15th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2022) ['Modeling and Evaluating Faithful Generation in Language (and Vision)': video]

Robustness in Sequential Data (ROSE) Workshop, CVPR 2022

Summarization of Creative Text Workshop, COLING 2022

Indian Symposium on Machine Learning (IndoML), 2021 ['Knowledgeable and Spatio-Temporal Vision+Language': video]

Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) Workshop, EMNLP 2021

Closing the Loop Between Vision and Language (CLVL) Workshop, ICCV 2021 ['Knowledgeable and Spatio-Temporal Vision+Language': video]

Human Interaction for Robotic Navigation Workshop, ICCV 2021 ['Video and Embodied Grounding for Language': video]

CVIT Summer School on Artificial Intelligence, 2021

Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR) Workshop, NAACL 2021

Person in Context Workshop, CVPR 2021

VQA Workshop, CVPR 2021 ['Knowledgeable and Spatio-Temporal Vision+Language': video, slides]

IJCAI 2020 Early Career Spotlight Talk

Singapore Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SSNLP 2020) ['Towards Knowledge-Robust and Multimodally-Grounded NLP': video]

3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT @ EMNLP 2019) ['Knowledgeable and Multimodal Language Generation': slides]

1st Workshop on Beyond Vision and Language: Integrating Knowledge from Real-World (LANTERN @ EMNLP 2019) ['Knowledgeable and Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Language+Vision+Robotics': slides]

Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering (MRQA @ EMNLP 2019) ['Interpretability and Robustness for Multi-Hop QA': slides]

4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP @ ACL 2019) ['Knowledgeable and Adversarially-Robust Representation Learning': slides]

RSS-2018 Natural Human-Robot Communication Workshop ['Spatially-Grounded, Personable, and Sensible Human-Robot Communication']

Triangle ML Day

Google Assistant Dialog Workshop

Machine Learning Summer School

SAS-Nvidia Deep Learning Symposium

ML@GeorgiaTech Seminar

Kenan-InfiaML-Rethinc Machine Learning Symposium

UNC Alumni AI Panel

Students/Postdocs

Student openings: I am looking for highly motivated PhD students. If you are interested in the broad areas of multimodal NLP (with vision and speech, for robotics), language generation and dialogue/Q&A, and structured+interpretable deep learning, please see my prospective student page and contact me at mbansal-AT-cs-DOT-unc-DOT-edu for further details.

More student info at: MURGe-Lab

UNC Advisees:
Elias Stengel-Eskin (UNC Postdoc; JHU PhD)
Jaehong Yoon (UNC Postdoc; KAIST PhD)

Jaemin Cho (UNC, PhD) (Bloomberg PhD Fellowship, 2023)
Jialu Li (UNC, PhD)
Yi-Lin Sung (UNC, PhD)
Prateek Yadav (UNC, PhD)
Archiki Prasad (UNC, PhD) (Apple PhD Fellowship, 2025)
David Wan (UNC, PhD) (Google PhD Fellowship, 2024)
Vaidehi Patil (UNC, PhD)
Ziyang Wang (UNC, PhD)
Shoubin Yu (UNC, PhD)
Justin Chen (UNC, PhD)
Han Lin (UNC, PhD)
Han Wang (UNC, PhD)
Zaid Khan (UNC, PhD)
Daeun Lee (UNC, PhD)
Duy Nguyen (UNC, PhD)
Zun Wang (UNC, PhD)

Past Advisees:
Swarnadeep Saha (UNC, PhD) (Google PhD Fellow) --> Research Scientist, FAIR Labs Meta
Yichen Jiang (UNC, PhD) (Apple AI/ML PhD Fellow) --> Research Scientist, Apple AI/ML
Peter Hase (UNC, PhD) (Google PhD Fellow) --> Research Resident, Anthropic
Adyasha Maharana --> Research Scientist, Databricks Mosaic Research (UNC, PhD)
Shiyue Zhang (UNC, PhD) (Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellow) --> Research Engineer, Bloomberg AI
Xiang Zhou (UNC, PhD) --> Research Engineer, Google Deepmind
Lisa Bauer (UNC, PhD) (NSF Graduate Research Fellow) --> Research Scientist, Amazon AI
Hyounghun Kim (UNC, PhD) --> Assistant Professor, POSTECH
Jie Lei (UNC, PhD; co-advisor: Tamara Berg) (Adobe Research Fellow) --> Research Scientist, Facebook AI
Yixin Nie (UNC, PhD) --> Research Scientist, Facebook AI
Darryl Hannan (UNC, MS) --> AI Engineer, Drexel
Ramakanth Pasunuru (UNC, PhD) (Microsoft Research PhD Fellow; Facebook PhD Fellowship Finalist) --> Senior Research Scientist, FAIR Labs Meta
Hao Tan (UNC, PhD) (Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellow) --> Research Scientist, Adobe Research
Yen-Chun Chen (UNC, MS) --> Researcher, Microsoft Research
Tong Niu (Visiting student; Duke, MS) --> Research Scientist, Salesforce Research
Licheng Yu (UNC, PhD; advisor = Tamara Berg) --> Research Scientist, Facebook AI

Zhuofan Ying (UNC, BS) --> PhD Student, Columbia
Zineng Tang (UNC, BS) (CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award 2023) --> PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Abhay Zala (UNC, MS) --> Research Engineer, Heygen
Hanna Tischer (UNC, BS) --> Senior Data Scientist, GE
Harry Xie (Duke, BS + Visiting Student, UNC) --> PhD Student, CMU Statistics
Han Guo (UNC, BS) (CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Finalist, 2020) --> PhD Student, CMU/MIT
Sweta Karlekar (UNC, BS) (CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Runner-Up, 2020) --> ML Engineer, Facebook --> PhD Student, Columbia
Yinuo (Eva) Hu (UNC, BS) (Highest Honors) --> MS, UC Berkeley
Samip Dahal (UNC, BS) --> Replit
Antonio Mendoza (UNC, BS) --> Verisk Analytics
Tsion Coulter (UNC, BS) --> Deloitte
Songhe Wang (UNC, BS) --> PhD Student, Penn State
Yicheng Wang (UNC, BS) --> Software Engineer, JaneStreet
Nitish Joshi (Visiting student; IIT Bombay, BS) --> PhD Student, NYU

Malika Aubakirova (UChicago, BS)
Arjun Chandrasekaran (Visiting Student; Georgia Tech, PhD; advisor = Devi Parikh)
Dhivya Eswaran (IIT-Madras, BTech --> CMU, PhD)
Rasool Fakoor (UT-Arlington, PhD --> MSR)
Arnab Ghosh (IIT Kanpur, BTech --> Oxford, PhD)
Yuchen He (UIUC, PhD)
Myungin Kim (UChicago, MS)
Zuyao Li (USC, MS --> Google/Nest)
Ang Lu (Tsinghua, BS --> CMU, MS)
Pranava S. Madhyastha (UPC Barcelona, PhD)
Hongyuan Mei (UChicago/TTIC, MS --> JHU, PhD --> Purdue, Asst. Professor) (MS Thesis Co-Advisor)
Aravind L Srinivas (IIT Madras, BTech --> UC Berkeley, PhD --> CEO, Perplexity)
Ryan Stout (UIUC, MS)
Trang Tran (UWash, PhD)
Jing Wang (UIC, PhD --> Conversant)
John Wieting (UIUC/TTIC MS --> CMU, PhD)
Zhengyang Wu (GeorgiaTech, BS --> MagicLeap)

Professional Service

Program Chair, EMNLP 2024

Member, ACL Executive Committee (2022-2024)

Member, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee (2021-2024)

Action Editor, TACL Journal

Action Editor, Computational Linguistics (CL) Journal

Associate Editor, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing (TASLP)

Editorial Board, Computer Speech and Language Journal

Americas Sponsorship Co-Chair for the ACL (2020-2022)

Senior Area Chair: EACL 2024

Senior Area Chair: EMNLP 2023

Senior Area Chair: ACL Rolling Review (ARR)

Senior Area Chair: IJCAI 2023

Senior Area Chair: AAAI 2023

Area Chair: NeurIPS 2022

Senior Area Chair: ACL 2022

Area Chair: ICLR 2022

Senior Area Chair (Vision, Robotics, Grounding): ACL 2021

Senior Area Chair (Vision, Robotics, Grounding): NAACL 2021

Senior Area Chair: AAAI 2021

Senior Area Chair (Machine Learning): EMNLP 2020

Senior Area Chair (Sentence Semantics): ACL 2020

Program Co-Chair: CoNLL 2019

Senior Program Committee Member: AAAI 2020

Area Chair (Semantics): EMNLP 2019

Area Chair (Summarization): NAACL 2019

Area Chair (Discourse, Dialogue, Summarization, Generation, Multimodal NLP): EMNLP 2018

Tutorial Chair: NAACL 2018

Area Chair (Vision, Robots, and Grounding): ACL 2017

Area Chair (Machine Learning): EMNLP 2017

Demo Chair: ACL 2017

Tutorial Chair: NAACL 2016

Area Chair: NAACL 2016

Program Committee Member / Reviewer:

Conferences: EMNLP (best reviewer award, 2012), NAACL (best reviewer award, 2018, 2015), ACL, NIPS, ICLR, IJCAI, EACL, COLING (outstanding reviewer award, 2018), *SEM, IJCNLP, ICON

Journals: TACL, TPAMI, TALIP

Workshops: ACL Workshop of Women in Natural Language Processing (2017), ACL Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (2017), EACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing (2017), NAACL Multilingual and Crosslingual Methods in NLP (2016), NAACL Human-Computer Question Answering (2016), ACL Evaluating Vector-Space Representations for NLP (2016), NAACL Vector Space Modeling for NLP (2015)

University Research Proposals: ORAU

Organizer: SpLU-RoboNLP Joint Workshop at NAACL 2019, CVPR 2019 Workshop on Conceptual Captions, NLP/ML Colloquium Series at UNC, Language Grounding for Robotics at ACL 2017, Midwest Speech and Language Days 2015

Committee Member: Graduate (PhD) Admissions Committee, EECS, UC Berkeley

Panel Member: National Science Foundation (NSF) Review Panels

Software and Datasets: Available as links with corresponding paper in Publications/Code/Data.