Contact
University of Pennsylvania
Levine 402
myatskar@cis.upenn.edu
Mark Yatskar

I am an Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania in the department of Computer and Information Science. I did my PhD at University of Washington co-advised by Luke Zettlemoyer and Ali Farhadi. I was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence for several years working with their computer vision team, Prior. My work is interdisciplinary, spanning Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Fairness in Machine Learning. I received a Best Paper Award at EMNLP for work on gender bias amplification (Wired article).

My research broadly explores how language can be used to structure visual perception. I work on machine learning approaches that enable tight coupling between how people express themselves in language and how machine behavior is specified. A central thread in my research is trying to understand how machine learning systems inherit human bias. My lab currently explores two main research themes around expanding the abilities artificial intelligence systems:

Natural language as a scaffold for visual intelligence

Natural language is an effective human tool for communicating important world knowledge. This knowledge can be extracted, and used to create explict priors for how visual recognition systems need to behave. Such systems can be more data-efficient, interpretable, and capture a wider range of human abilities. Recent Projects:


Language Model Guided Bottlenecks Goal-Step Inference using Wikihow Situations in Video

Understanding the role of human biases in machine learning

Machine learning systems depend on human specification through explict annotation, collected data, and model design. In all parts of this process, people may unknownlingly bias systems and cause them to be brittle. In such cases, systems may fail to generalize given distribution shift, or cause the model to make gender biased predictions when models are uncertain. It is important to characterise and control how human biases are transfered to machine learning systems. Recent Projects:


Annotator Cognative Heuristics Ensembles for Reducing Dataset Bias Gender Bias Amplification

whylab

I supervise a collaboritive group of PhD and masters students that I do research with. I am always looking for talented, motivated students to work with. If you are an interested persepective PhD student, I encourage you to apply to University of Pennsylvania, I am looking for students every year (Please see info below).

PhD Students

Masters Students

Alumni

  • Daniel Kim (Undergraduate to UW PhD )
  • Lucy Yuewei Yuan (Undergraduate to Meta)
Perspective PhD Students: info
Penn Students Interested in Research: info

Teaching

CIS 5300: Computational Linguistics: SP 2021 , FA 2021 , FA 2022, FA 2023
CIS 7000: Language and Vision:
FA 2020
CIS 6300: Efficient NLP: SP 2023

News

  • Feb 2023: at JHU - Talk on Understanding Dataset Biases
  • Dec 2022: at CMU - Talk on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing
  • Jun 2022: at NAACL - Panel on Gender Bias in NLP
  • May 2022: TaskBot team in the finals, and places 4th overall
  • Nov 2021: QuAC section of EMNLP Crowdsource Tutorial
  • June 2021: Co-advising Penn Alexa TaskBot Team with Chris Callison-Burch

    Publications

    Usually, the most up to date list of my publications is found on semantic scholar.