Sarvesh Baskar
Author directory2026
Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models
Manan Suri | Sarvesh Baskar | Dinesh Manocha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Manan Suri | Sarvesh Baskar | Dinesh Manocha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.
Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Refining Textual Embeddings
Aakriti Agrawal | Gouthaman KV | Rohith Aralikatti | Gauri Jagatap | Jiaxin Yuan | Sarvesh Baskar | Vijay Kamarshi | Andrea Fanelli | Furong Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Aakriti Agrawal | Gouthaman KV | Rohith Aralikatti | Gauri Jagatap | Jiaxin Yuan | Sarvesh Baskar | Vijay Kamarshi | Andrea Fanelli | Furong Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain a persistent challenge, often stemming from inadequate integration of visual information during multimodal reasoning. A key cause is the model’s over-reliance on textual priors and underutilization of visual cues, leading to outputs that are linguistically fluent but visually inaccurate. For example, given an image of an empty kitchen countertop, an LVLM might hallucinate a “bowl of fruit” or “cup of coffee,” relying on language associations rather than visual evidence. Most LVLMs incorporate visual features by appending them to the input stream of a pre-trained LLM and training on large-scale vision-language datasets. Our systematic analysis reveals that this strategy often leads to over-dependence on textual information due to the inherent bias of LLMs towards language-dominant representations. This imbalance skews attention towards the text over visual content, weakening the model’s ability to ground outputs in visual inputs. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective visual feature incorporation method that encourages the model to learn visually-informed textual embeddings distinct from those of the base LLM and promotes a more balanced attention distribution. Experimental results across multiple hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucinations and fosters more balanced multimodal reasoning. Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains, including +9.33% on MMVP-MLLM, +2.99% on POPE-AOKVQA, up to +3.4% on Merlin, and +3% on the hard-data split of HallusionBench.
2025
(CPER) From Guessing to Asking: An Approach to Resolving Persona Knowledge Gap in LLMs during Multi-Turn Conversations
Sarvesh Baskar | Manas Gaur | Srinivasan Parthasarathy | Tanmay Tulsidas Verlekar
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Sarvesh Baskar | Manas Gaur | Srinivasan Parthasarathy | Tanmay Tulsidas Verlekar
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
In multi-turn dialogues, large language models face a critical challenge of ensuring coherence while adapting to user-specific information.. This study introduces the persona knowledge gap, the discrepancy between a model’s internal understanding and the knowledge required for coherent, personalized conversations. While prior research has recognized these gaps, computational methods for their identification and resolution remain underexplored. We propose Conversation Preference Elicitation and Recommendation (CPER), a novel framework that dynamically detects and resolves persona knowledge gaps using intrinsic uncertainty quantification and feedback-driven refinement. CPER consists of three key modules: a Contextual Understanding Module for preference extraction, a Dynamic Feedback Module for measuring uncertainty and refining persona alignment, and a Persona-Driven Response Generation module for adapting responses based on accumulated user context. We evaluate CPER on two real-world datasets: CCPE-M for preferential movie recommendations and ESConv for mental health support. Using A/B testing, human evaluators preferred CPER’s responses 42% more often than baseline models in CCPE-M and 27% more often in ESConv. A qualitative human evaluation confirms that CPER’s responses are preferred for maintaining contextual relevance and coherence, particularly in longer (12+ turn) conversations.