Related papers: Mirage or Method? How Model-Task Alignment Induces…

LLMs increasingly excel on AI benchmarks, but doing so does not guarantee validity for downstream tasks. This study contrasts LLM alignment on benchmarks, downstream tasks, and, importantly the intended impact of those tasks. We evaluate…

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support the analysis of complex financial disclosures, yet their reliability, behavioral consistency, and transparency remain insufficiently understood in high-stakes settings. This…

Reward models (RMs) are central to the alignment of language models (LMs). An RM often serves as a proxy for human preferences to guide downstream LM behavior. However, our understanding of RM behavior is limited. Our work (i) formalizes a…

Large language models (LLMs) have become essential tools in software development, widely used for requirements engineering, code generation and review tasks. Software engineers often rely on LLMs to verify if code implementation satisfy…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities across various tasks, but their claim to practical relevance is still mired by concerns on their reliability. Recent works have proposed examining the…

Alignment has quickly become a default ingredient in LLM development, with techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback making models act safely, follow instructions, and perform ever-better on complex tasks. While these…

While the promises of Multi-Task Learning (MTL) are attractive, characterizing the conditions of its success is still an open problem in Deep Learning. Some tasks may benefit from being learned together while others may be detrimental to…

Reinforcement learning (RL) models have shown the capability of learning complex behaviors, but quantitatively assessing those behaviors - which is critical for safety assurance and the discovery of novel strategies - is challenging. By…

Latent learning, classically theorized by Tolman, shows that biological agents (e.g., rats) can acquire internal representations of their environment without rewards, enabling rapid adaptation once rewards are introduced. In contrast, from…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

In recent years, challenging control problems became solvable with deep reinforcement learning (RL). To be able to use RL for large-scale real-world applications, a certain degree of reliability in their performance is necessary. Reported…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent capabilities in complex reasoning, largely spurred by rule-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques applied during the post-training. This has raised the…

Large language models (LLMs) can produce erroneous responses that sound fluent and convincing, raising the risk that users will rely on these responses as if they were correct. Mitigating such overreliance is a key challenge. Through a…

Pretraining NLP models with variants of Masked Language Model (MLM) objectives has recently led to a significant improvements on many tasks. This paper examines the benefits of pretrained models as a function of the number of training…

The black-box nature of deep reinforcement learning (RL) hinders them from real-world applications. Therefore, interpreting and explaining RL agents have been active research topics in recent years. Existing methods for post-hoc…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle in sparse-reward environments where traditional exploration strategies fail to discover effective action sequences. Large Language Models (LLMs) possess procedural knowledge and reasoning…

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extensive reasoning traces lead to inefficiencies and increased time-to-first-token (TTFT). We propose a training…

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities utilizing reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable reward, whether large vision-language models (VLMs) can directly inherit such capabilities through similar…