About Me

Hello! I am an ML Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, where I work on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and am advised by Prof. Alan Ritter. I am thankful to be supported by the Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship.

I am currently an intern in the AI Learning and Interaction group at Microsoft Research. Previously, I interned at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley, working in Prof. Stuart Russell’s group.

Feel free to reach out at emendes3[at]gatech[dot]edu.

Recent Publications:

• Making Expert Reasoning Learnable with Self-Distillation
  Ethan Mendes, Jungsoo Park, Alan Ritter
  ICML 2026
  [paper] [code]

• GeoRC: A Benchmark for Geolocation Reasoning Chains
  Mohit Talreja, Joshua Diao, Jim Thannikary James, Radu Casapu, Tejas Santanam, Ethan Mendes, Alan Ritter, Wei Xu, James Hays
  ACL 2026
  [paper] [code]

• Do Vision-Language Models Respect Contextual Integrity in Location Disclosure?
  Ruixin Yang, Ethan Mendes, Arthur Wang, James Hays, Sauvik Das, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter
  ICLR 2026
  [paper] [code]

• Language Models can Self-Improve at State-Value Estimation for Better Search
  Ethan Mendes, Alan Ritter
  NeurIPS 2025 (Spotlight)
  [paper] [code]

• Granular Privacy Control for Geolocation with Vision Language Models
  Ethan Mendes, Yang Chen, James Hays, Sauvik Das, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter
  EMNLP 2024 (Oral)
  [paper] [data / code]

• ChatHF: Collecting Rich Human Feedback from Real-time Conversations
  Andrew Li, Zhenduo Wang, Ethan Mendes, Duong Minh Le, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter
  EMNLP 2024 (Demo)
  [paper]

• Tensor Trust: Interpretable Prompt Injection Attacks from an Online Game
  Sam Toyer, Olivia Watkins, Ethan Mendes, Justin Svegliato, Luke Bailey, Tiffany Wang, Isaac Ong, Karim Elmaaroufi, Pieter Abbeel, Trevor Darrell, Alan Ritter, Stuart Russell
  ICLR 2024 (Spotlight)
  [paper] [data] [code] [project page]

• Can Language Models be Instructed to Protect Personal Information?
  Yang Chen*, Ethan Mendes*, Sauvik Das, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter
  [paper] [data] [project page]

• Human-in-the-loop Evaluation for Early Misinformation Detection: A Case Study of COVID-19 Treatments
  Ethan Mendes, Yang Chen, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter
  ACL 2023
  [paper] [data]