Hi, I’m Michael Ryan and I’m a Master’s student studying Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. I’m fortunate to be doing NLP research as a member of Dr. Diyi Yang’s SALT Lab! I’m also a core contributor to StanfordNLP/DSPy – the library for programming not prompting LLMs. I’m on the optimizer team for DSPy and I am the co-creator of the DSPy MIPRO optimizer.
My research interest is Human-Centered NLP through two directions: LLM personalization for various cultures, languages, and individuals [1] [2]. And leveraging humans for system design and feedback to make better AI systems. [3] Previously I was an undergraduate researcher in Dr. Wei Xu’s NLP X Lab at Georgia Tech and a research intern at Snowflake.
Have a look at my CV, or if you’re in a hurry, check out my resume!
MS in Computer Science, 2025
Stanford University
BSc in Computer Science (Intelligence & Systems/Architecture), 2023
Georgia Institute of Technology
We present MIPROv2, a language model program optimizer which improves both prompts and fewshot demonstrations for multistage language model programs. Our strategies include (i) program- and data-aware techniques for proposing effective instructions, (ii) a stochastic mini-batch evaluation function for learning a surrogate model of our objective, and (iii) a meta-optimization procedure in which we refine how LMs construct proposals over time. MIPRO outperforms baseline optimizers on five of seven diverse multi-stage LM programs using a best-in-class open-source model (Llama-3-8B), by as high as 13% accuracy.
We explore how alignment impacts performance along three axes of global representation, English dialects, multilingualism, and opinions from and about countries worldwide. Our results show that current alignment procedures create disparities between English dialects and global opinions. We find alignment improves capabilities in several languages. We conclude by discussing design decisions that led to these unintended impacts and recommendations for more equitable preference tuning.
We release the MultiSim benchmark, a collection of 27 resources in 12 distinct languages containing over 1.7 million complex-simple sentence pairs. This benchmark will encourage research in developing more effective multilingual text simplification models and evaluation metrics. Our experiments using MultiSim with pre-trained multilingual language models reveal exciting performance improvements from multilingual training in non-English settings.