Taylor Sorensen

Taylor Sorensen

PhD Student at the University of Washington

Taylor Sorensen (he/him)

Hi! I’m Taylor Sorensen, a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Washington, advised by Dr. Yejin Choi. You can reach me at tsor13 [AT] cs.washington.edu.

Research Interests

My research is centered around natural language processing (NLP), with a particular focus on pluralistic alignment (roadmap paper), including (post-)training large language models (LLMs) to represent broad human values and perspectives and maintain diversity. I also aim to enhance AI system’s capabilities to navigate subjective judgments, handle epistemic uncertainty, and support democracy.

News

  • 📚 Dedicated NeurIPS workshop on pluralistic alignment, advised by Yoshua Bengio (Dec 2024)
  • 🎤 Invited talk at the Berkeley Simons Institute (Oct 2024)
  • 🇬🇧 Internship at Google DeepMind in London (July 2024)
  • 🎉 Awarded research grant from the Institute for Humane Studies (June 2024)
  • 📰 Our ICML position paper featured by Jack Clark’s Import AI Newsletter and Nathan Lambert’s Interconnect Newsletter (June 2024)
  • 🎤 Value Kaleidoscope selected for oral presentation (top 1.5%) at AAAI (Feb 2024)
  • 🗳️ Our paper on using AI for democratic discourse accepted at PNAS (Oct 2023)
  • 🌧️ Internship at Allen Institute for AI (AI2) in Seattle (June 2023)
  • 🎓 Started PhD at UW, advised by Yejin Choi (Sep 2022)

Publications

Publications are listed in reverse chronological order. For a list of all publications, see my google scholar profile.

  • Value Profiles for Encoding Human Variation
    Taylor Sorensen, Pushkar Mishra, Roma Patel, Michael Henry Tessler, Michiel Bakker, Georgina Evans, Jason Gabriel, Noah Goodman, Verena Rieser
    arXiv Preprint
    Paper

  • Information-Guided Identification of Training Data Imprint in (Proprietary) Large Language Models
    Abhilasha Ravichander, Jillian Fisher, Taylor Sorensen, Ximing Lu, Yuchen Lin, Maria Antoniak, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi
    NAACL 2025
    Paper

  • Investigating machine moral judgement through the Delphi experiment
    Liwei Jiang, Jena D Hwang, Chandra Bhagavatula, Ronan Le Bras, Jenny T Liang, Sydney Levine, Jesse Dodge, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Maxwell Forbes, Jack Hessel, Jon Borchardt, Taylor Sorensen, Saadia Gabriel, Yulia Tsvetkov, Oren Etzioni, Maarten Sap, Regina Rini, Yejin Choi
    Nature Machine Intelligence
    Paper

  • Can Language Models Reason about Individualistic Human Values and Preferences?
    Liwei Jiang, Taylor Sorensen, Sydney Levin, Yejin Choi
    Arxiv Preprint
    Paper

  • Modular Pluralism: Pluralistic Alignment via Multi-LLM Collaboration
    Shangbin Feng, Taylor Sorensen, Yuhan Liu, Jillian Fisher, Chan Young Park, Yejin Choi, Yulia Tsvetkov
    EMNLP 2024
    Paper

  • A Roadmap to Pluralistic Alignment
    Taylor Sorensen, Jared Moore, Jillian Fisher, Mitchell Gordon, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Christopher Michael Rytting, Andre Ye, Liwei Jiang, Ximing Lu, Nouha Dziri, Tim Althoff, Yejin Choi
    ICML 2024 Position Paper
    Paper, Featured in Jack Clark’s Import AI and Interconnects, Invited Talk

  • Leveraging AI for democratic discourse: Chat interventions can improve online political conversations at scale
    Lisa P. Argyle, Christopher A. Bail, Ethan C. Busby, Joshua R. Gubler, Thomas Howe, Christopher Rytting, Taylor Sorensen, David Wingate
    Published in PNAS
    Paper, Science Journal for Kids Adaptation

  • Value Kaleidoscope: Engaging AI with Pluralistic Human Values, Rights, and Duties
    Taylor Sorensen, Liwei Jiang, Jena Hwang, Sydney Levine, Valentina Pyatkin, Peter West, Nouha Dziri, Ximing Lu, Kavel Rao, Chandra Bhagavatula, Maarten Sap, John Tasioulas, Yejin Choi
    AAAI 2024 Oral (top 3% of submissions)
    Paper, Presentation, Demo, Code, Dataset, Model, Invited Talk

  • NovaCOMET: Open Commonsense Foundation Models with Symbolic Knowledge Distillation
    Peter West, Ronan Bras, Taylor Sorensen, Bill Lin, Liwei Jiang, Ximing Lu, Khyathi Chandu, Jack Hessel, Ashutosh Baheti, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi
    Findings of EMNLP 2023
    Paper

  • Impossible Distillation: from Low-Quality Model to High-Quality Dataset & Model for Summarization and Paraphrasing
    Jaehun Jung, Peter West, Liwei Jiang, Faeze Brahman, Ximing Lu, Jillian Fisher, Taylor Sorensen, Yejin Choi
    NAACL 2024
    Paper

  • Towards Coding Social Science Datasets with Language Models
    Christopher Michael Rytting, Taylor Sorensen, Lisa Argyle, Ethan Busby, Nancy Fulda, Joshua Gubler, David Wingate
    Arxiv Preprint
    Paper

  • Prompt Compression and Contrastive Conditioning for Controllability and Toxicity Reduction in Language Models
    David Wingate, Mohammad Shoeybi, Taylor Sorensen
    Findings of EMNLP 2022
    Paper, Code

  • An Information-theoretic Approach to Prompt Engineering Without Ground Truth Labels
    Taylor Sorensen, Joshua Robinson, Christopher Michael Rytting, Alexander Glenn Shaw, Kyle Jeffrey Rogers, Alexia Pauline Delorey, Mahmoud Khalil, Nancy Fulda, David Wingate
    ACL 2022
    Paper, Code, Presentation

  • Nl-augmenter: A framework for task-sensitive natural language augmentation
    Kaustubh D Dhole, Varun Gangal, Sebastian Gehrmann, …, Taylor Sorensen et al.
    Arxiv Preprint
    Paper, Code

  • Using first principles for deep learning and model-based control of soft robots
    Curtis C Johnson, Tyler Quackenbush, Taylor Sorensen, David Wingate, Marc D Killpack
    Frontiers in Robotics and AI
    Paper, Code

Invited Talks

  • [UPCOMING] Foundations of Responsible Computing Pre-Conference Workshop, June 2025
  • [UPCOMING] Disagreement Workshop Value Profiles for Encoding Human Variation. May 2025
  • National Symposium on Equitable AI Pluralistic Alignment: A Roadmap, Recent Work, and Open Problems. April 2025
  • MilaNLP Pluralistic Alignment: A Roadmap, Recent Work, and Open Problems. Jan 2025
  • Berkeley Simons Institute Pluralistic Alignment: A Roadmap, Recent Work, and Open Problems. Oct 2024 Recording
  • Dealing with Meaning Variation in NLP, University of Utrecht - AI and Pluralistic Human Values Oct 2024
  • University College London Aligning AI with Pluralistic Human Values. Sep 2024
  • Vienna Alignment Workshop Pluralistic Alignment. July 2024
  • IBM Research AI and Pluralistic Human Values. March 2024
  • BuzzRobot AI Community Aligning AI with Pluralistic Human Values. May 2024 Recording

====== Website last updated: May 14, 2025