I am a postdoc on the Semantic Scholar team at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and in Hanna Hajishirzi’s group at the University of Washington. I work on applied machine learning broadly. Currently, I’m especially interested in information retrieval methods and text diffusion models. In the past I’ve also worked on text evaluation metrics, hallucination mitigation and steganography.
I received my Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where I was advised by Kilian Q Weinberger. During my PhD, I interned at Google with Ni Lao and John Blitzer, at Microsoft Research with Tristan Nauman and at ASAPP with David Sontag.
Before joining Cornell, I completed my undergraduate degree in Math and Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College. There, I conducted research in algorithms for computational biology with Prof. Yi-Chieh (Jessica) Wu.
Outside of research, I enjoy climbing, playing basketball and exploring the outdoors!
Publications and Preprints
Diffusion Guided Language Modeling
Justin Lovelace, Varsha Kishore, Yiwei Chen, and Kilian Weinberger
In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024 Aug , 2024.
@inproceedings{lovelace-etal-2024-diffusion,title={Diffusion Guided Language Modeling},author={Lovelace, Justin and Kishore, Varsha and Chen, Yiwei and Weinberger, Kilian},booktitle={Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024},month=aug,year={2024},publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics},url={https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.887},pages={14936--14952}}
@inproceedings{lovelace2022latent,title={Latent Diffusion for Language Generation},author={Lovelace, Justin and Kishore, Varsha and Wan, Chao and Shaktman, Eliot and Weinberger, Kilian Q},booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},acronym={NeurIPS},year={2023},}
@inproceedings{kishore2023incdsi,title={IncDSI: Incrementally Updatable Document Retrieval},author={Kishore, Varsha and Wan, Chao and Lovelace, Justin and Artzi, Yoav and Weinberger, Kilian Q},booktitle={International Conference on Machine Learning},acronym={ICML},year={2023},}
Correction with Backtracking Reduces Hallucination in Summarization
Zhenzhen Liu, Chao Wan, Varsha Kishore, Jin Zhou, Minmin Chen, and
1 more author
@inproceedings{liu2023correction,title={Correction with Backtracking Reduces Hallucination in Summarization},author={Liu, Zhenzhen and Wan, Chao and Kishore, Varsha and Zhou, Jin and Chen, Minmin and Weinberger, Kilian Q},booktitle={arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.16176},year={2023},}
Learning Iterative Neural Optimizers for Image Steganography
Varsha Kishore, Xiangyu Chen, and Kilian Q Weinberger
In International Conference on Learning Representations Aug (ICLR), 2022.
@inproceedings{chen2023learning,title={Learning Iterative Neural Optimizers for Image Steganography},author={Kishore, Varsha and Chen, Xiangyu and Weinberger, Kilian Q},booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},acronym={ICLR},year={2022},}
Harnessing interpretable and unsupervised machine learning to address big data from modern X-ray diffraction
Jordan Venderley, Krishnanand Mallayya, Michael Matty, Matthew Krogstad, Jacob Ruff, and
6 more authors
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Aug , 2022.
@article{venderley2022harnessing,title={Harnessing interpretable and unsupervised machine learning to address big data from modern X-ray diffraction},author={Venderley, Jordan and Mallayya, Krishnanand and Matty, Michael and Krogstad, Matthew and Ruff, Jacob and Pleiss, Geoff and Kishore, Varsha and Mandrus, David and Phelan, Daniel and Poudel, Lekhanath and others},journal={Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},volume={119},number={24},pages={e2109665119},year={2022},publisher={National Acad Sciences},}
Fixed Neural Network Steganography: Train the images, not the network
Varsha Kishore, Xiangyu Chen, Yan Wang, Boyi Li, and Kilian Q Weinberger
In International Conference on Learning Representations Aug (ICLR), 2021.
@inproceedings{kishore2021fixed,title={Fixed Neural Network Steganography: Train the images, not the network},author={Kishore, Varsha and Chen, Xiangyu and Wang, Yan and Li, Boyi and Weinberger, Kilian Q},booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},acronym={ICLR},year={2021},}
Bertscore: Evaluating text generation with bert
Tianyi Zhang, Varsha Kishore, Felix Wu, Kilian Q Weinberger, and Yoav Artzi
In International Conference on Learning Representations Aug (ICLR), 2019.
@inproceedings{zhang2019bertscore,title={Bertscore: Evaluating text generation with bert},author={Zhang, Tianyi and Kishore, Varsha and Wu, Felix and Weinberger, Kilian Q and Artzi, Yoav},booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},acronym={ICLR},year={2019},}
