Planning in Creative Contexts
Alexander Spangher (University of Southern California)
Colloquium
Tuesday, February 25, 2025, 3:30 pm
Gates Center (CSE2), G20 | Amazon Auditorium
Abstract
Recent modeling innovations incorporate planning — or reasoning about actions (exhibited by models like GPT-o1 and Deepseek's R1) — and have demonstrated impressive performance gains in areas like mathematical problem-solving and computer coding. However, such domains are characterized by well-defined goals (or rewards). For many human-centered tasks in creative contexts, rewards are not as clearly defined and it is thus not clear how to make similar progress in these domains. In this talk, I will outline a research agenda that can enable us to make progress in these fundamentally human processes. I focus on tasks related to journalism, where there is a pressing need for technical innovation. Specifically, in this talk I will focus on the task of retrieving sources relevant to news stories: I will show how (1) we can make inferences about human actions based on environmental state-observations (a process known to cognitive psychologists as "end-state" or "ghost conditions", but as yet unexplored in machine learning); and, (2) how these inferences can help us learn human values and rewards.
Bio
Alexander Spangher is pursuing his PhD in computer science at the University of Southern California; he is formerly a writer and data scientist at the New York Times. He focuses on computational journalism and is advised by Jonathan May, Emilio Ferrara and Nanyun Peng. His research is broad and has pursued the following side directions: he has worked at Microsoft Research under the mentorship of Eric Horvitz to detect misinformation. He has collaborated with EleutherAI to build state-of-the-art symbolic music models. Finally, he has collaborated with the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC) to model disruptions in nuclear fusion reactions. His work has received numerous awards: 2 Outstanding Paper Awards at EMNLP 2024, 1 Spotlight Award at ICML 2024, an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2022 and a Best Paper Award at CJ2023. He is fortunate to be supported by a 4-year Bloomberg PhD Fellowship.
This talk will be streamed live on our YouTube channel. Link will be available on that page one hour prior to the event.