Skyler Hallinan

Selected Publications

(for the full list of my publications, please see my Google Scholar)

• OpaqueToolsBench: Learning Nuances of Tool Behavior Through Interaction
  Skyler Hallinan, Thejas Venkatesh, Xiang Ren, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy, Ashwin Paranjape, Yuhao Zhang, Jack Hessel
  In submission to ICLR 2026
  
  
• The Surprising Effectiveness of Membership Inference with Simple N-Gram Metrics
  Skyler Hallinan, Jaeuhun Jung, Melanie Sclar, Ximing Lu, Abhilasha Ravichander, Sahana Ramnath, Yejin Choi, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Xiang Ren
  CoLM 2025
  
  
• Prismatic Synthesis: Gradient-based Data Diversification Boosts Generalization in LLM Reasoning
  Jaehun Jung, Seungju Han*, Ximing Lu*, Skyler Hallinan*, David Acuna, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Mostafa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Yejin Choi
  To appear at NeurIPS 2025
  
  
• Amulet: Putting Complex Multi-Turn Conversations on the Stand with LLM Juries
  Sahana Ramnath, Anurag Mudgil, Brihi Joshi, Skyler Hallinan, Xiang Ren
  EMNLP 2025
  
  
• AI as Humanity's Salieri: Quantifying Linguistic Creativity of Language Models via Systematic Attribution of Machine Text against Web Text
  Ximing Lu, Melanie Sclar, Skyler Hallinan, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Jiacheng Liu, Seungju Han, Allyson Ettinger, Liwei Jiang, Khyathi Chandu, Nouha Dziri, Yejin Choi
  ICLR 2025, Oral (Top 1.8% of Accepted Papers)
  
  
• StyleRemix: Interpretable Authorship Obfuscation via Distillation and Perturbation of Style Elements
  Jillian Fisher*, Skyler Hallinan*, Ximing Lu, Mitchell Gordon, Zaid Harchaoui, Yejin Choi
  EMNLP 2024
  
  
• Tailoring Self-Rationalizers with Multi-Reward Distillation
  Sahana Ramnath, Brihi Joshi, Skyler Hallinan, Ximing Lu, Liunian Harold Li, Aaron Chan, Jack Hessel, Yejin Choi, Xiang Ren
  ICLR 2024
  
  
• 🐂 STEER: Unified Style Transfer with Expert Reinforcement
  Skyler Hallinan, Faeze Brahman, Ximing Lu, Jaehun Jung, Sean Welleck, Yejin Choi
  Findings of EMNLP 2023
  
  
• Inference-time Policy Adapters (IPA): Tailoring Extreme-Scale LMs Without Fine-Tuning
  Ximing Lu, Faeze Brahman, Peter West, Jaehun Jung, Khyathi Chandu, Abhilasha Ravichander, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Liwei Jiang, Sahana Ramnath, Nouha Dziri, Jillian Fisher, Bill Lin, Skyler Hallinan, Lianhui Qin, Xiang Ren, Sean Welleck, Yejin Choi
  EMNLP 2023
  
  
• Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-feedback
  Aman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta, Skyler Hallinan, Luyu Gao, Sarah Wiegreffe, Uri Alon, Nouha Dziri, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Yiming Yang, Sean Welleck, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Shashank Gupta, Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Peter Clark
  NeurIPS, 2023
  Top 100 most-cited AI papers of 2023 (#45) [link]
  
  
• Detoxifying Text with MaRCo: Controllable Revision with Experts and Anti-Experts
  Skyler Hallinan, Alisa Liu, Yejin Choi, Maarten Sap
  ACL 2023
  
  
• Rainier: Reinforced Knowledge Introspector for Commonsense Question Answering
  Jiacheng Liu, Skyler Hallinan, Ximing Lu, Pengfei He, Sean Welleck, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Yejin Choi
  EMNLP 2022
  
  
• Misinfo Reaction Frames: Reasoning about Readers' Reactions to News Headlines
  Saadia Gabriel, Skyler Hallinan, Maarten Sap, Pemi Nguyen, Franziska Roesner, Eunsol Choi, Yejin Choi
  ACL 2022

Invited Talks

• 2025 - "OpaqueToolsBench: Learning Nuances of Tool Behavior Through Interaction"
  Microsoft, Redmond, WA (Virtual)
• 2025 - "The Surprising Effectiveness of Membership Inference with Simple N-Gram Metrics"
  USC ISI Seminar [Video]
• 2024 - "Small but Mighty: Empowering Small Language Models to Outperform Their Larger Counterparts"
  Qualcomm, San Diego, CA (Joint Talk with Jillian Fisher)
• 2023 - "Enhancing the Utility of Large Language Models with Algorithms"
  Apple, Seattle, WA (Virtual)

Media Coverage

• 2024 - "AI writing is improving, but it still can’t match human creativity"
  Science [Article]
• 2021 - "“Every single one of you has what it takes to do great things”: A tribute to the Allen School Class of 2021"
  Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering [Article]
• 2020 - "Six Allen School undergraduates recognized for excellence in research"
  Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering [Article]

Honors & Awards

• (2024) Anneberg PhD Fellowship
• (2021) Outstanding Senior Award, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
  
• (2021) Dean's Medal Nomination, College of Arts & Sciences, University of Washington
  
• (2020) Levinson Emerging Scholars Award, University of Washington
  
• (2019) Stratos-Stephen Endowed Scholar, University of Washington
  
• (2019) Resarch Conference Travel Award, University of Washington
  
• (2018) Robert B. Rodal Endowed Scholar, University of Washington

Teaching Experience

• (Winter, 2023) Head TA @ CSE 573 (Graduate Artifical Intelligence) at University of Washington
• (Winter, 2024) TA @ CSE 447/517 (Undergraduate/Graduate NLP) at University of Washington
• (Spring, 2021 - Autumn 2023) TA @ CSE 473 (Undergraduate Artifical Intelligence) at University of Washington