The Stanford OVAL
Knowledge Center
We build LLM-Augmented Cognition Systems (LLM-CSys) that combine the expressive language skills of LLMs with the interpretability and reliability of software systems. We connect LLMs with databases, compilers, and executive functions to create assistants that are more trustworthy and helpful.
ABOUT OUR WORK
Standalone LLMs are like the speech centers in our brains. They
rely on the prefrontal cortex for executive functions (attention, long-term planning) to communicate effectively. 
- Professor Monica Lam
RECENT TALK
"Controlling and Grounding Large Language Models for Conversational Assistants"
Generative AI and Foundation Models Workshop, Stanford Computer Forum, April 12, 2023
We invite students, researchers, and corporations to join us to advance the state of the art in conversational agents research and to apply the technology to real-world use cases.
News
Dec 2023 — Elizaveta Pertseva presented the paper Fine-tuned LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less with Few-Shot Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing over Wikidata at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Singapore.
Dec 2023 — Sina Semnani presented the paper WikiChat: Stopping the Hallucination of Large Language Model Chatbots by Few-Shot Grounding on Wikipedia at the Findings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Singapore.
July 2023 — Mehrad Moradshahi presented the paper X-RiSAWOZ: High-Quality End-to-End Multilingual Dialogue Datasets and Few-shot Agents at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Toronto, Canada.
May 2023 — Monica Lam presented a plenary talk "Controlling and Grounding Large Language Models for Conversational Assistants" at the Xpo Research Symposium of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering.
May 2023 — Mehrad Moradshahi presented two papers Zero and Few-Shot Localization of Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents with a Distilled Representation and Contextual Semantic Parsing for Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogues at the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Dubrovnik, Croatia.
April 2023 — Monica Lam presented "Controlling and Grounding Large Language Models for Conversational Assistants" at the Generative AI and Foundation Models Workshop in the Computer Science Annual Affiliates Meeting.
Nov 2022 — Monica Lam presented a keynote at the 9th International Conference on Information Management and Big Data (SIMBig) in Lima, Peru.
Nov 2022 — Monica Lam presented a keynote on "Taming Neural Language Models into Trustworthy Conversational Virtual Assistants" at the Open Data Science Conference in San Francisco.
Acknowledgement
OVAL is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1900638, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under Grant No. G-2020-13938, Microsoft, and the Verdant Foundation. We also want to thank our partners Alpha Vantage, Baidu, Picovoice, and Yelp for their support.