Atharvan Dogra, Krishna Pillutla, Ameet Deshpande, Ananya B. Sai, John J Nay, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Balaraman Ravindran. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in a new paradigm of search engines that use generative models to gather and summarize information to answer user queries. This emerging technology, which we formalize under the unified framework of generative engines (GEs), can generate accurate and personalized responses, rapidly replacing traditional search engines like Google and Bing. Generative Engines typically satisfy queries by synthesizing information from multiple sources and summarizing them using LLMs. While this shift significantly improvesuser utility and generative search engine traffic, it poses a huge challenge for the third stakeholder -- website and content creators. Given the black-box and fast-moving nature of generative engines, content creators have little to no control over when and how their content is displayed. With generative engines here to stay, we must ensure the creator economy is not disadvantaged. To address this, we introduce Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the first novel paradigm to aid content creators in improving their content visibility in generative engine responses through a flexible black-box optimization framework for optimizing and defining visibility metrics. We facilitate systematic evaluation by introducing GEO-bench, a large-scale benchmark of diverse user queries across multiple domains, along with relevant web sources to answer these queries. Through rigorous evaluation, we demonstrate that GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses. Moreover, we show the efficacy of these strategies varies across domains, underscoring the need for domain-specific optimization methods. Our work opens a new frontier in information discovery systems, with profound implications for both developers of generative engines and content creators.

Vishvak Murahari, Ameet Deshpande, Peter Clark, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashish Sabharwal, Karthik Narasimhan, Ashwin Kalyan. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Ameet Deshpande, Carlos Jimenez, Howard Chen, Vishvak Murahari, Victoria Graf, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Danqi Chen, Karthik Narasimhan. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

In this paper, we present a novel approach for distilling math word problem solving capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient student models. Our approach is designed to consider the student model's weaknesses and foster a tailored learning experience by generating targeted exercises aligned with educational science principles, such as knowledge tracing and personalized learning. Concretely, we let GPT-3 be a math tutor and run two steps iteratively: 1) assessing the student model's current learning status on a GPT-generated exercise book, and 2) improving the student model by training it with tailored exercise samples generated by GPT-3. Experimental results reveal that our approach outperforms LLMs (e.g., GPT-3 and PaLM) in accuracy across three distinct benchmarks while employing significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the various components within our methodology to substantiate their efficacy.

Visual and linguistic concepts naturally organize themselves in a hierarchy, where a textual concept "dog" entails all images that contain dogs. Despite being intuitive, current large-scale vision and language models such as CLIP do not explicitly capture such hierarchy. We propose MERU, a contrastive model that yields hyperbolic representations of images and text. Hyperbolic spaces have suitable geometric properties to embed tree-like data, so MERU can better capture the underlying hierarchy in image-text datasets. Our results show that MERU learns a highly interpretable and structured representation space while being competitive with CLIP's performance on standard multi-modal tasks like image classification and image-text retrieval.

Swaroop Mishra, Matthew Finlayson, Pan Lu, Leonard Tang, Sean Welleck, Chitta Baral, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Oyvind Tafjord, Ashish Sabharwal, Peter Clark, Ashwin Kalyan. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022.