@misc{tyagi2026noteveryrubric,title={Not Every Rubric Teaches Equally: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for RLVR},author={Tyagi, Utkarsh and Guo, Xingang and Rezaei, MohammadHossein and George, Daniel and Mahmoud, Anas and Lee, Jackson and Liu, Bing and He, Yunzhong},month=may,year={2026},eprint={2605.20164},archiveprefix={arXiv},primaryclass={cs.AI},url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20164},}
@misc{mahmoud2026rewardhacking,title={Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning},author={Mahmoud, Anas and Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Wang, Zihao and Gunjal, Anisha and Liu, Bing and He, Yunzhong},month=may,year={2026},eprint={2605.12474},archiveprefix={arXiv},primaryclass={cs.CL},url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12474},}
@inproceedings{rezaei2026onlinerubricselicitationpairwise,title={Online Rubrics Elicitation from Pairwise Comparisons},author={Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Vacareanu, Robert and Wang, Zihao and Wang, Clinton and Liu, Bing and He, Yunzhong and Akyürek, Afra Feyza},booktitle={Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},month=jul,year={2026},address={Seoul, South Korea},note={To appear},eprint={2510.07284},archiveprefix={arXiv},primaryclass={cs.CL},url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07284},}
@misc{raghavendra2026sweatlas,title={SWE Atlas: Benchmarking Coding Agents Beyond Issue Resolution},author={Raghavendra, Mohit and Dan, Soham and Calvo, Miguel Romero and He, Yannis Yiming and Mols, Johannes Baptist and Anand, Gautam and McCollum, Cole and Arakelyan, Edgar and Bharadwaj, Vijay and Park, Andrew and Da, Jeff and Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Liu, Bing and Kenstler, Brad and He, Yunzhong},month=may,year={2026},eprint={2605.08366},archiveprefix={arXiv},primaryclass={cs.CL},url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08366},}
@inproceedings{wang-etal-2026-commonsense,title={Commonsense Knowledge with Negation: A Resource to Enhance Negation Understanding},author={Wang, Zijie and Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Rashid, Farzana and Blanco, Eduardo},booktitle={Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026},year={2026},note={To appear},url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19921}}
@inproceedings{rezaei-etal-2025-egonormia,title={EgoNormia: Benchmarking Physical-Social Norm Understanding},author={Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Fu, Yicheng and Cuvin, Phil and Ziems, Caleb and Zhang, Yanzhe and Zhu, Hao and Yang, Diyi},booktitle={Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025},month=jul,year={2025},address={Vienna, Austria},url={https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.985/},publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics},doi={10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.985},pages={19256--19283},isbn={979-8-89176-256-5},}
In 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), Apr 2025
Negation has been a long-standing challenge for language models.Previous studies have shown that they struggle with negation in many natural language understanding tasks.In this work, we propose a self-supervised method to make language models more robust against negation.We introduce a novel task, Next Sentence Polarity Prediction (NSPP), and a variation of the Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) task.We show that BERT and RoBERTa further pre-trained on our tasks outperform the off-the-shelf versions on nine negation-related benchmarks.Most notably, our pre-training tasks yield between 1.8% and 9.1% improvement on CondaQA, a large question-answering corpus requiring reasoning over negation.
@inproceedings{rezaei-blanco-2025-making,title={Making Language Models Robust Against Negation},author={Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Blanco, Eduardo},editor={Chiruzzo, Luis and Ritter, Alan and Wang, Lu},booktitle={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)},month=apr,year={2025},address={Albuquerque, New Mexico},publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics},url={https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.413/},pages={8123--8142},isbn={979-8-89176-189-6},}
Negation is a common linguistic phenomenon. Yet language models face challenges with negation in many natural language understanding tasks such as question answering and natural language inference. In this paper, we experiment with seamless strategies that incorporate affirmative interpretations (i.e., paraphrases without negation) to make models more robust against negation. Crucially, our affirmative interpretations are obtained automatically. We show improvements with CondaQA, a large corpus requiring reasoning with negation, and five natural language understanding tasks.
@inproceedings{rezaei-blanco-2024-paraphrasing,title={Paraphrasing in Affirmative Terms Improves Negation Understanding},author={Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Blanco, Eduardo},editor={Ku, Lun-Wei and Martins, Andre and Srikumar, Vivek},booktitle={Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)},month=aug,year={2024},address={Bangkok, Thailand},publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics},url={https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.55/},doi={10.18653/v1/2024.acl-short.55},pages={602--615},}
Detecting machine-generated text is a critical task in the era of large language models. In this paper, we present our systems for SemEval-2024 Task 8, which focuses on multi-class classification to discern between human-written and maching-generated texts by five state-of-the-art large language models. We propose three different systems: unsupervised text similarity, triplet-loss-trained text similarity, and text classification. We show that the triplet-loss trained text similarity system outperforms the other systems, achieving 80% accuracy on the test set and surpassing the baseline model for this subtask. Additionally, our text classification system, which takes into account sentence paraphrases generated by the candidate models, also outperforms the unsupervised text similarity system, achieving 74% accuracy.
@inproceedings{rezaei-EtAl:2024:SemEval2024,author={Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Kwon, Yeaeun and Sanayei, Reza and Singh, Abhyuday and Bethard, Steven},title={CLULab-UofA at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Detecting Machine-Generated Text Using Triplet-Loss-Trained Text Similarity and Text Classification},booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)},month=jun,year={2024},address={Mexico City, Mexico},publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics},pages={1509--1515},url={https://aclanthology.org/2024.semeval2024-1.213},}
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized Natural Language Generation (NLG), offering unmatched text generation capabilities. However, this progress introduces significant challenges, notably hallucinations—semantically incorrect yet fluent outputs. This phenomenon undermines content reliability, as traditional detection systems focus more on fluency than accuracy, posing a risk of misinformation spread.Our study addresses these issues by proposing a unified strategy for detecting hallucinations in neural model-generated text, focusing on the SHROOM task in SemEval 2024. We employ diverse methodologies to identify output divergence from the source content. We utilized Sentence Transformers to measure cosine similarity between source-hypothesis and source-target embeddings, experimented with omitting source content in the cosine similarity computations, and Leveragied LLMs’ In-Context Learning with detailed task prompts as our methodologies. The varying performance of our different approaches across the subtasks underscores the complexity of Natural Language Understanding tasks, highlighting the importance of addressing the nuances of semantic correctness in the era of advanced language models.
@inproceedings{sanayei-etal-2024-maria,title={{MAR}i{A} at {S}em{E}val 2024 Task-6: Hallucination Detection Through {LLM}s, {MNLI}, and Cosine similarity},author={Sanayei, Reza and Singh, Abhyuday and Rezaei, Mohammadhossein and Bethard, Steven},editor={Ojha, Atul Kr. and Do{\u{g}}ru{\"o}z, A. Seza and Tayyar Madabushi, Harish and Da San Martino, Giovanni and Rosenthal, Sara and Ros{\'a}, Aiala},booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)},month=jun,year={2024},address={Mexico City, Mexico},publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics},url={https://aclanthology.org/2024.semeval-1.225/},doi={10.18653/v1/2024.semeval-1.225},pages={1584--1588},}
Yes-no questions expect a yes or no for an answer, but people often skip polar keywords. Instead, they answer with long explanations that must be interpreted. In this paper, we focus on this challenging problem and release new benchmarks in eight languages. We present a distant supervision approach to collect training data, and demonstrate that direct answers (i.e., with polar keywords) are useful to train models to interpret indirect answers (i.e., without polar keywords). We show that monolingual fine-tuning is beneficial if training data can be obtained via distant supervision for the language of interest (5 languages). Additionally, we show that cross-lingual fine-tuning is always beneficial (8 languages).
@inproceedings{wang-etal-2023-interpreting,title={Interpreting Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions in Multiple Languages},author={Wang, Zijie and Hossain, Md and Mathur, Shivam and Melo, Terry and Ozler, Kadir and Park, Keun and Quintero, Jacob and Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Shakya, Shreya and Uddin, Md and Blanco, Eduardo},editor={Bouamor, Houda and Pino, Juan and Bali, Kalika},booktitle={Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023},month=dec,year={2023},address={Singapore},publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics},url={https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.146/},doi={10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.146},pages={2210--2227},}
2022
Solving Functional Equations in R+ Using Inequalities and Sequences
@article{rezaei2024solving,title={Solving Functional Equations in R+ Using Inequalities and Sequences},author={Rezaei, MohammadHossein},journal={Mathematical Reflections},number={3},year={2022},publisher={AwesomeMath},note={High School Mathematics Olympiad Journal},}