Sean Welleck

About Me

Incoming Assistant Professor (Jan. 2024)
Carnegie Mellon University
School of Computer Science
Language Technologies Institute

Postdoctoral Scholar
University of Washington / AI2

Previously, I received a PhD at New York University, advised by Kyunghyun Cho.
I host the Thesis Review Podcast.

Research

My research focuses on deep learning and neural language generation, including:

• Machine learning for code and mathematics
• Learning and inference algorithms
• Science of neural language models

Recent news

• 08.2023: llmstep: language model proofstep suggestions in Lean [github]
• 08.2023: ntptutorial: interactive notebook tutorial on neural theorem proving [github]
• 08.2023: IJCAI tutorial on neural theorem proving [slides]
• 06.2023: Panel on Generative AI in Finance and Economics; CMU
• 06.2023: Talk at AI to Assist Mathematical Reasoning Workshop; NASEM [slides]
• 05.2023: Talk on Draft, Sketch, Prove at Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics. [slides]

Upcoming

• 10.2023: Talk at Harvard CMSA
• 12.2023: Co-organizing Tutorial on Machine Learning for Theorem Proving at Neurips
• 12.2023: Co-organizing Math+AI workshop at Neurips

Publications

• Self-refine: Iterative refinement with self-feedback
  A. Madaan, N. Tandon, P. Gupta, S. Hallinan, L. Gao, S. Wiegreffe, U. Alon, No. Dziri, S. Prabhumoye, Y. Yang, B. Prasad Majumder, S. Gupta, S. Welleck, A. Yazdanbakhsh, P. Clark
  NeurIPS 2023
• Limits of Transformers on Compositionality
  N. Dziri*, X. Lu*, M. Sclar*, X. Lorraine Li, L. Jiang, B. Lin, P. West, C. Bhagavatula, R. Le Bras, J. D Hwang, So. Sanyal, S. Welleck, X. Ren, A. Ettinger, Z. Harchaoui, Y. Choi
  NeurIPS 2023 (Spotlight)
• A Survey of Deep Learning for Mathematical Reasoning
  P. Lu, L. Qiu, W. Yu, S. Welleck*, K. Chang*
  ACL 2023
• Generating Sequences by Learning to [Self-]Correct
  S. Welleck*, X. Lu*, P. West+, F. Brahman+, T. Shen, D. Khashabi, Y. Choi
  ICLR 2023.
  [poster]
• Draft, Sketch, and Prove: Guiding Formal Theorem Provers with Informal Proofs
  A. Jiang*, S. Welleck*, J. Zhou*, T. Lacroix, J. Liu, W. Li, M. Jamnik, G. Lample+, Y. Wu+
  ICLR 2023(Oral).
  [data]
• NaturalProver: Grounded Mathematical Proof Generation with Language Models
  S. Welleck, J. Liu, X. Lu, H. Hajishirzi, Y. Choi.
  NeurIPS 2022.
  [data][code][slides][poster]
• Quark: Controllable Text Generation with Reinforced [Un]learning
  X. Lu, S. Welleck, L. Jiang, J. Hessel, L. Qin, P. West, P. Ammanabrolu, Y. Choi.
  NeurIPS 2022 (Oral).
  [poster]
• COLD Decoding: Energy-based Constrained Text Generation with Langevin Dynamics
  L. Qin, S. Welleck, D. Khasabi, Y. Choi.
  NeurIPS 2022 (Oral).
  [code][poster]
• Maieutic Prompting: Logically Consistent Reasoning with Recursive Explanations
  J. Jung, L. Qin, S. Welleck, F. Brahman, C. Bhagavatula, R. Le Bras, Y. Choi.
  EMNLP 2022.
  [code][slides]
• Lila: A Unified Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning
  S. Mishra, M. Finlayson, P. Lu, L. Tang, S. Welleck, C. Baral, T. Rajpurohit, O. Tafjord, A. Sabharwal, P. Clark, A. Kalyan
  EMNLP 2022.
  [data][project page]
• Rainier: Reinforced Knowledge Introspector for Commonsense Question Answering
  J. Liu, S. Hallinan, X. Lu, P. He, S. Welleck, H. Hajishirzi, Y. Choi.
  EMNLP 2022.
• NeuroLogic A*esque Decoding: Constrained Text Generation with Lookahead Heuristics
  X. Lu, S. Welleck, P. West, L. Jiang, J. Kasai, D. Khasabi, R. Le Bras, L. Qin, Y. Yu, R. Zellers, N. Smith, Y. Choi.
  NAACL 2022.
  [code][slides]
• Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models
  P. West, C. Bhagavatula, J. Hessel, J. Hwang, L. Jiang, R. Le Bras, X. Lu, S. Welleck, Y. Choi.
  NAACL 2022.
  [code]
• Prompt Waywardness: The Curious Case of Discretized Interpretation of Continuous Prompts
  D. Khasabi, S. Lyu, S. Min, L. Qin, K. Richardson, S. Singh, S. Welleck, H. Hajishirzi, T. Khot, A. Sabharway, Y. Choi.
  NAACL 2022.
• Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning
  J. Liu, A. Liu, X. Lu, S. Welleck, P. West, R. Le Bras, Y. Choi, H. Hajishirzi.
  ACL 2022.
  [code]
• Symbolic Brittleness in Sequence Models: on Systematic Generalization in Symbolic Mathematics
  S. Welleck, P. West, J. Cao, Y. Choi.
  AAAI 2022.
  [code][slides][talk]
• Towards Grounded Natural Language Proof Generation
  S. Welleck, J. Liu, J. Han, Y. Choi.
  MathAI4Ed Workshop at NeurIPS 2021 (Contributed Talk).
  [poster][slides]
• NaturalProofs: Mathematical Theorem Proving in Natural Language
  S. Welleck, J. Liu, R. Le Bras, H. Hajishirzi, Y. Choi, K. Cho.
  NeurIPS 2021 Datasets and Benchmarks (Oral (Top 1%)).
  [data/code][talk][related data]
• MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers
  K. Pillutla, S. Swayamdipta, R. Zellers, J. Thickstun, S. Welleck, Y. Choi, Z. Harchaoui.
  NeurIPS 2021 (Oral, Outstanding Paper Award (Top 0.1%)).
  [code][press]
• Divergence Frontiers for Generative Models: Sample Complexity, Quantization Level, and Frontier Integral
  L. Liu, K. Pillutla, S. Welleck, S. Oh, Y. Choi, Z. Harchaoui.
  NeurIPS 2021.
• Mode recovery in neural autoregressive sequence modeling
  I. Kulikov, S. Welleck, K. Cho.
  SPNLP 2021.
  [code]
• Order and Learning in Sequential Neural Structured Prediction
  S. Welleck.
  PhD Thesis, New York University.
  [slides]
• MLE-guided parameter search for task loss minimization in neural sequence modeling
  S. Welleck, K. Cho.
  AAAI 2021.
  [code][poster][talk]
• Consistency of a Recurrent Language Model With Respect to Incomplete Decoding
  S. Welleck, I. Kulikov, J. Kim, R. Pang, K. Cho.
  EMNLP 2020.
  [code][talk]
• A Generalized Framework of Sequence Generation with Application to Undirected Sequence Models
  E. Mansimov, A. Wang, S. Welleck, K. Cho.
  arXiv pre-print 2020.
  [code]
• Making Inconsistent Dialogue Unlikely with Unlikelihood Training
  M. Li, S. Roller, I. Kulikov, S. Welleck, Y.L. Boureau, K. Cho, J. Weston.
  ACL 2020.
• Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training
  S. Welleck, I. Kulikov, S. Roller, E. Dinan, K. Cho, J. Weston.
  ICLR 2020.
  [code]
• Non-Monotonic Sequential Text Generation
  S. Welleck, K. Brantley, H. Daume III, K. Cho.
  ICML 2019.
  [code] [slides] [poster]
• Sequential Graph Dependency Parser
  S. Welleck, K. Cho.
  RANLP 2019.
  [slides]
• Dialogue Natural Language Inference
  S. Welleck, J. Weston, A. Szlam, K. Cho.
  ACL 2019.
  [dataset][poster][press]
• Loss Functions for Multiset Prediction
  S. Welleck, Z. Yao, Y. Gai, J. Mao, Z. Zhang, K. Cho.
  NeurIPS 2018.
  NVIDIA AI Labs Pioneering Research Award 2018.
  [poster]
• Saliency-based Sequential Image Attention with Multiset Prediction
  S. Welleck, J. Mao, K. Cho, Z. Zhang.
  NeurIPS 2017.
  NVIDIA AI Labs Pioneering Research Award 2017.
  [poster][press]
• Efficient AUC Optimization for Information Ranking Applications
  S. Welleck.
  ECIR 2016.

Selected Talks

• [08.2023]: A tutorial on neural theorem proving; IJCAI, OIST (9.2023) [slides]
• [06.2023]: Talk at AI to Assist Mathematical Reasoning Workshop; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. [slides]
• [05.2023]: Talk on Draft, Sketch, Prove at Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics. [slides]
• [11.2022] Talk at Microsoft Research on NaturalProver and Draft, Sketch, and Prove.
• [10.2022] Talk at NSF Expeditions: Understanding the World Through Code seminar.
• [09.2022] Talk at Google on Maeutic Prompting [slides].
• [09.2022] Talk at AITP 2022 on NaturalProver [slides].
• [05.2022] Talks at IFDS and Cohere.ai on constrained text generation [slides].

Teaching

• Guest Lecture: Neural sequence generation (DATA 598) [slides]
  University of Washington
  March 2023.
• Guest Lecture: Reliable text generation through graph search (CSE 373) [slides]
  University of Washington
  November 2022.
• Guest Lecture: Neural sequence generation (DATA 598) [slides]
  University of Washington
  March 2022.
• Deep Learning (DS-GA 1008)
  New York University
  Fall 2020
• Deep Learning for NLP
  African Master’s Program in Machine Intelligence
  March 2020
• Introduction to Machine Learning (CSCI-UA 0473)
  New York University
  Spring 2020
• NLP with Representation Learning (DS-GA 1011)
  New York University
  Fall 2019

Tutorials

• Neural theorem proving [slides][github]
  In Deep Learning in Mathematical Reasoning [tutorial site]
  IJCAI 2023.
• Neurosymbolic NLP: Modularity & Constraints for Neural Language Models [slides][tutorial site]
  COLING 2022.
• Denoising Diffusion Models [slides]
  July 2022.
• Generative Modeling with (W)GAN [slides]
  NYU Shanghai
  April 2018.

Workshops

• Math-AI: 3rd Workshop on Mathematical Reasoning and AI
  NeurIPS 2023
• Math-AI: Toward Human-Level Mathematical Reasoning
  NeurIPS 2022
• MathNLP: 1st Workshop on Mathematical Natural Language Processing
  EMNLP 2022
• Math AI for Education: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Smart Education
  NeurIPS 2021

Past

• NYU (PhD), Sep. 2016 - Jan. 2021
• Facebook, AI Research Team (FAIR), May. 2019 - Sep. 2019
• Facebook, AI Research Team (FAIR), May. 2018 - Jan. 2019
• Primer AI, Feb. 2016 - Aug. 2016
• IBM, Sep. 2014 - Feb. 2016
• University of Pennsylvania (Computer Science, MSE), May. 2013 - May. 2014
• University of Pennsylvania (Computer Science, BSE), Sep. 2009 - Feb. 2013