Visiting EMNLP and presenting our Subliminal Learning paper

Last week I got to visit Budapest in order to attend the largest conference in natural language processing: EMNLP! And large it was; with over 7000 (!!!) participants, 2000+ papers and even more workshops, it was overwhelming to say the least. Luckily I didn’t have to go by myself, as we had multiple people from our lab that had something to present here.

I presented our workshop paper on subliminal learning, in which we reproduced the subliminal learning results from Cloud et al. and introduced some new domains. The workshop (BlackboxNLP) was probably my favorite part of the conference, as you could really get a sense of community, which was harder to find during the main conference. Mostly because of the sheer size of the conference, but there was also an incredible amount of low effort, AI generated presentation and talks. When even the opening keynote speaker proudly states that she generated all of her slides (we could notice), what signal does that give to the rest of the people at the conference?

Overall it was a great experience though. Meeting new people, listening to interesting talks and mostly discussing your own research is always of great value. Going to EMNLP was on my list ever since I started my PhD, and I’m glad I could finally pay a visit. Hopefully till next year!

You can read the paper here. Code is on GitHub.