Abhinav Java, Simra Shahid, Chirag Agarwal. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Modern Text-to-Image (T2I) Diffusion models have revolutionized image editing by enabling the generation of high-quality photorealistic images. While the de-facto method for performing edits with T2I models is through text instructions, this approach is non-trivial due to the complex many-to-many mapping between natural language and images. In this work, we address exemplar-based image editing - the task of transferring an edit from an exemplar pair to a content image(s). We propose Reedit, a modular and efficient end-to-end framework that captures edits in both text and image modalities while ensuring the fidelity of the edited image. We validate the effectiveness of Reedit through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art baselines and sensitivity analyses of key design choices. Our results demonstrate that Reeditconsistently outperforms contemporary approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, Reedit boasts high practical applicability, as it does not require any task-specific optimization and is 4× faster than the existing state-of-the-art. The code and data for our work is available at https://reedit-diffusion.github.io/.

Fairness in Language Models (LMs) remains a long-standing challenge, given the inherent biases in training data that can be perpetuated by models and affect the downstream tasks. Recent methods employ expensive retraining or attempt debiasing during inference by constraining model outputs to contrast from a reference set of biased templates/exemplars. Regardless, they don’t address the primary goal of fairness to maintain equitability across different demographic groups. In this work, we posit that inferencing LMs to generate unbiased output for one demographic under a context ensues from being aware of outputs for other demographics under the same context. To this end, we propose Counterfactually Aware Fair InferencE (CAFIE), a framework that dynamically compares the model’s understanding of diverse demographics to generate more equitable sentences. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation using base LMs of varying sizes and across three diverse datasets and found that CAFIE outperforms strong baselines. CAFIE produces fairer text and strikes the best balance between fairness and language modeling capability.

Achieving fairness in Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to pose a persistent challenge, as these models are prone to inheriting biases from their training data, which can subsequently impact their performance in various applications. There is a need to systematically explore whether structured prompting techniques can offer opportunities for debiased text generation by LLMs. In this work, we designed an evaluative framework to test the efficacy of different prompting techniques for debiasing text along different dimensions. We aim to devise a general structured prompting approach to achieve fairness that generalizes well to different texts and LLMs.

Shaz Furniturewala, Surgan Jandial, Abhinav Java, Pragyan Banerjee, Simra Shahid, Sumit Bhatia, Kokil Jaidka. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Active consumption of digital documents has yielded scope for research in various applications, including search. Traditionally, searching within a document has been cast as a text matching problem ignoring the rich layout and visual cues commonly present in structured documents, forms, etc. To that end, we ask a mostly unexplored question: "Can we search for other similar snippets present in a target document page given a single query instance of a document snippet?". We propose MONOMER to solve this as a one-shot snippet detection task. MONOMER fuses context from visual, textual, and spatial modalities of snippets and documents to find query snippet in target documents. We conduct extensive ablations and experiments showing MONOMER outperforms several baselines from one-shot object detection (BHRL), template matching, and document understanding (LayoutLMv3). Due to the scarcity of relevant data for the task at hand, we train MONOMER on programmatically generated data having many visually similar query snippets and target document pairs from two datasets - Flamingo Forms and PubLayNet. We also do a human study to validate the generated data.