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The Stroop effect refers to cognitive interference in a color-naming task: When the color and the word do not match, the response is slower and more likely to be incorrect. The Stroop task is used to assess cognitive flexibility, selective…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, where they must execute user-specified tasks over externally provided reference text. In practice, such context is often…

Random-feature-based attention (RFA) is an efficient approximation of softmax attention with linear runtime and space complexity. However, the approximation gap between RFA and conventional softmax attention is not well studied. Built upon…

We introduce Robust Filter Attention (RFA), a formulation of self-attention as a robust state estimator. Each token is treated as a noisy observation of a latent trajectory governed by a linear stochastic differential equation (SDE), and…

Robust, faithful and harm-free pronoun use for individuals is an important goal for language model development as their use increases, but prior work tends to study only one or two of these characteristics at a time. To measure progress…

We leverage diffusion models to study the robustness-performance tradeoff of robust classifiers. Our approach introduces a simple, pretrained diffusion method to generate low-norm counterfactual examples (CEs): semantically altered data…

In reinforcement learning, Reverse Experience Replay (RER) is a recently proposed algorithm that attains better sample complexity than the classic experience replay method. RER requires the learning algorithm to update the parameters…

The Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE) investigates the synergistic relationship between word-level and text-level classifications in text classification tasks. It posits that the performance of both classification levels can be mutually…

Reinforcement learning (RL) training is inherently unstable due to factors such as moving targets and high gradient variance. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) can…

Humans must flexibly arbitrate between exploring alternatives and exploiting learned strategies, yet they frequently exhibit maladaptive persistence by continuing to execute failing strategies despite accumulating negative evidence. Here we…

Visual Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents must learn to act based on high-dimensional image data where only a small fraction of the pixels is task-relevant. This forces agents to waste exploration and computational resources on irrelevant…

Learning a reward function from demonstrations suffers from low sample-efficiency. Even with abundant data, current inverse reinforcement learning methods that focus on learning from a single environment can fail to handle slight changes in…

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces substantial challenges when applied to real-life problems, primarily stemming from the scarcity of available data due to limited interactions with the environment. This limitation is exacerbated by the fact…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

The Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE) investigates the synergistic relationship between word-level and text-level classifications in text classification tasks. It posits that the performance of both classification levels can be mutually…

Carefully crafted, often imperceptible, adversarial perturbations have been shown to cause state-of-the-art models to yield extremely inaccurate outputs, rendering them unsuitable for safety-critical application domains. In addition, recent…

Test-time defenses are used to improve the robustness of deep neural networks to adversarial examples during inference. However, existing methods either require an additional trained classifier to detect and correct the adversarial samples,…

Sibling fixed effects (FE) models are useful for estimating causal treatment effects while offsetting unobserved sibling-invariant confounding. However, treatment estimates are biased if an individual's outcome affects their sibling's…

Doubly robust estimators (DRE) are widely used in causal inference because they yield consistent estimators of average causal effect when at least one of the nuisance models, the propensity for treatment (exposure) or the outcome…

Binary choices, as often used for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), convey only the direction of a preference. A person may choose apples over oranges and bananas over grapes, but which preference is stronger? Strength is…