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Targeted syntactic evaluations of language models ask whether models show stable preferences for syntactically acceptable content over minimal-pair unacceptable inputs. Most targeted syntactic evaluation datasets ask models to make these…
Recent research shows that fine-tuning on benign instruction-following data can inadvertently undo the safety alignment process and increase a model's propensity to comply with harmful queries. While instruction-following fine-tuning is…
Language models must be adapted to understand and follow user instructions. Reinforcement learning is widely used to facilitate this -- typically using fixed criteria such as "helpfulness" and "harmfulness". In our work, we instead propose…
Neural text generation models conditioning on given input (e.g. machine translation and image captioning) are usually trained by maximum likelihood estimation of target text. However, the trained models suffer from various types of errors…
Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to interact with external environments (e.g., games, compilers, APIs) as goal-driven agents. However, it remains challenging for these language agents to quickly and efficiently learn…
Techniques that learn improved representations via offline data or self-supervised objectives have shown impressive results in traditional reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, it is unclear how improved representation learning can…
Generally capable agents must learn from experience in ways that generalize across tasks and environments. The fundamental problems of learning, including credit assignment, overfitting, forgetting, local optima, and high-variance learning…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments can produce training data with spurious correlations between features due to the amount of training data or its limited feature coverage. This can lead to RL agents encoding these misleading…
Meta-learning models have two objectives. First, they need to be able to make predictions over a range of task distributions while utilizing only a small amount of training data. Second, they also need to adapt to new novel unseen tasks at…
Language models trained on diverse datasets unlock generalization by in-context learning. Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies can achieve a similar effect by meta-learning within the memory of a sequence model. However, meta-RL research…
Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in…
Language model finetuning often results in learning undesirable traits in combination with desired ones. To address this, we propose inoculation prompting: modifying finetuning data by prepending a short system-prompt instruction that…
Regression models often fail to generalize effectively in regions characterized by highly imbalanced label distributions. Previous methods for deep imbalanced regression rely on gradient-based weight updates, which tend to overfit in…
Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…
Neural language models often struggle with low-resource languages due to the limited availability of training data, making tokens from these languages rare in the training set. This paper addresses a specific challenge during training: rare…
Traditional RLHF optimizes language models with coarse, scalar rewards that mask the fine-grained reasons behind success or failure, leading to slow and opaque learning. Recent work augments RL with textual critiques through prompting or…
Finetuning a language model can lead to emergent misalignment (EM) [Betley et al., 2025b]. Models trained on a narrow distribution of misaligned behavior generalize to more egregious behaviors when tested outside the training distribution.…
We propose a novel regularizer for supervised learning called Conditioning on Noisy Targets (CNT). This approach consists in conditioning the model on a noisy version of the target(s) (e.g., actions in imitation learning or labels in…
When applied to question answering and other text generation tasks, language models (LMs) may be queried generatively (by sampling answers from their output distribution) or discriminatively (by using them to score or rank a set of…
Adapting one's thought process based on corrective feedback is an essential ability in human learning, particularly in collaborative settings. In contrast, the current large language model training paradigm relies heavily on modeling vast,…