Dana Alon


2025

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DreamSync: Aligning Text-to-Image Generation with Image Understanding Feedback
Jiao Sun | Deqing Fu | Yushi Hu | Su Wang | Royi Rassin | Da-Cheng Juan | Dana Alon | Charles Herrmann | Sjoerd Van Steenkiste | Ranjay Krishna | Cyrus Rashtchian
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)

Despite their widespread success, Text-to-Image models (T2I) still struggle to produce images that are both aesthetically pleasing and faithful to the user’s input text. We introduce DreamSync, a simple yet effective training algorithm that improves T2I models to be faithful to the text input. DreamSync utilizes large vision-language models (VLMs) to effectively identify the fine-grained discrepancies between generated images and the text inputs and enable T2I models to self-improve without labeled data. First, it prompts the model to generate several candidate images for a given input text. Then, it uses two VLMs to select the best generation: a Visual Question Answering model that measures the alignment of generated images to the text, and another that measures the generation’s aesthetic quality. After selection, we use LoRA to iteratively finetune the T2I model to guide its generation towards the selected best generations. DreamSync does not need any additional human annotation, model architecture changes, or reinforcement learning. Despite its simplicity, DreamSync improves both the semantic alignment and aesthetic appeal of two diffusion-based T2I models, evidenced by multiple benchmarks (+1.7% on TIFA, +2.9% on DSG1K, +3.4% on VILA aesthetic) and human evaluation shows that DreamSync improves text rendering compared to SDXL by 18.5% on DSG1K benchmark.

2024

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OpenMSD: Towards Multilingual Scientific Documents Similarity Measurement
Yang Gao | Ji Ma | Ivan Korotkov | Keith Hall | Dana Alon | Donald Metzler
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

We develop and evaluate multilingual scientific documents similarity measurement models in this work. Such models can be used to find related papers in different languages, which can help multilingual researchers find and explore papers more efficiently. We propose the first multilingual scientific documents dataset, Open-access Multilingual Scientific Documents (OpenMSD), which has 74M papers in 103 languages and 778M citation pairs. With OpenMSD, we develop multilingual SDSM models by adjusting and extending the state-of-the-art methods designed for English SDSM tasks. We find that: (i)Some highly successful methods in English SDSM yield significantly worse performance in multilingual SDSM. (ii)Our best model, which enriches the non-English papers with English summaries, outperforms strong baselines by 7% (in mean average precision) on multilingual SDSM tasks, without compromising the performance on English SDSM tasks.

2023

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PaRaDe: Passage Ranking using Demonstrations with LLMs
Andrew Drozdov | Honglei Zhuang | Zhuyun Dai | Zhen Qin | Razieh Rahimi | Xuanhui Wang | Dana Alon | Mohit Iyyer | Andrew McCallum | Donald Metzler | Kai Hui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) can be instructed to effectively perform zero-shot passage re-ranking, in which the results of a first stage retrieval method, such as BM25, are rated and reordered to improve relevance. In this work, we improve LLM-based re-ranking by algorithmically selecting few-shot demonstrations to include in the prompt. Our analysis investigates the conditions where demonstrations are most helpful, and shows that adding even one demonstration is significantly beneficial. We propose a novel demonstration selection strategy based on difficulty rather than the commonly used semantic similarity. Furthermore, we find that demonstrations helpful for ranking are also effective at question generation. We hope our work will spur more principled research into question generation and passage ranking.