Eilam Shapira
Author directory2026
Donors and Recipients: On Asymmetric Transfer Across Tasks and Languages with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Kajetan Dymkiewicz | Ivan Vulić | Helen Yannakoudakis | Eilam Shapira | Roi Reichart | Anna Korhonen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Kajetan Dymkiewicz | Ivan Vulić | Helen Yannakoudakis | Eilam Shapira | Roi Reichart | Anna Korhonen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models (LLMs) perform strongly across tasks and languages, yet how improvements in one task or language affect other tasks and languages remains poorly understood. We conduct a controlled LoRA fine-tuning study across multiple open-weight LLM families and scales, using a standardised grid of 11 languages and four benchmarks. We fine-tune each model on a single task–language source, then evaluate it on all other task–language target pairs to measure transfer. We decompose transfer into three regimes: (i) Matched-Task (Cross-Language), (ii) Cross-Task (Matched-Language), and (iii) Cross-Task (Cross-Language). Single-source fine-tuning yields a net positive uplift across regimes, but the gains are strongly asymmetric. Matched-Task (Cross-Language) transfer emerges as the most effective and structurally regular regime, with transfer magnitude driven principally by the identity of the target language rather than model architecture. We identify a stable coarse-grained hierarchy in which some task and language targets consistently absorb gains from diverse sources, while others remain relatively isolated. These results imply that effective fine-tuning requires accounting for donor–recipient roles to maximise downstream gains while limiting collateral degradation in other capabilities.
2025
Human Choice Prediction in Language-based Persuasion Games: Simulation-based Off-Policy Evaluation
Eilam Shapira | Omer Madmon | Reut Apel | Moshe Tennenholtz | Roi Reichart
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 13
Eilam Shapira | Omer Madmon | Reut Apel | Moshe Tennenholtz | Roi Reichart
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 13
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred interest in designing LLM-based agents for tasks that involve interaction with human and artificial agents. This paper addresses a key aspect in the design of such agents: predicting human decisions in off-policy evaluation (OPE). We focus on language-based persuasion games, where an expert aims to influence the decision-maker through verbal messages. In our OPE framework, the prediction model is trained on human interaction data collected from encounters with one set of expert agents, and its performance is evaluated on interactions with a different set of experts. Using a dedicated application, we collected a dataset of 87K decisions from humans playing a repeated decision-making game with artificial agents. To enhance off-policy performance, we propose a simulation technique involving interactions across the entire agent space and simulated decision-makers. Our learning strategy yields significant OPE gains, e.g., improving prediction accuracy in the top 15% challenging cases by 7.1%.1
2024
Text2Model: Text-based Model Induction for Zero-shot Image Classification
Ohad Amosy | Tomer Volk | Eilam Shapira | Eyal Ben-David | Roi Reichart | Gal Chechik
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Ohad Amosy | Tomer Volk | Eilam Shapira | Eyal Ben-David | Roi Reichart | Gal Chechik
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
We address the challenge of building task-agnostic classifiers using only text descriptions, demonstrating a unified approach to image classification, 3D point cloud classification, and action recognition from scenes. Unlike approaches that learn a fixed representation of the output classes, we generate at inference time a model tailored to a query classification task. To generate task-based zero-shot classifiers, we train a hypernetwork that receives class descriptions and outputs a multi-class model. The hypernetwork is designed to be equivariant with respect to the set of descriptions and the classification layer, thus obeying the symmetries of the problem and improving generalization. Our approach generates non-linear classifiers, handles rich textual descriptions, and may be adapted to produce lightweight models efficient enough for on-device applications. We evaluate this approach in a series of zero-shot classification tasks, for image, point-cloud, and action recognition, using a range of text descriptions: From single words to rich descriptions. Our results demonstrate strong improvements over previous approaches, showing that zero-shot learning can be applied with little training data. Furthermore, we conduct an analysis with foundational vision and language models, demonstrating that they struggle to generalize when describing what attributes the class lacks.