Related papers: When Should We Introduce Safety Interventions Duri…
This paper addresses the question of how a previously available control policy $\pi_s$ can be used as a supervisor to more quickly and safely train a new learned control policy $\pi_L$ for a robot. A weighted average of the supervisor and…
Decision-making is a dynamic process requiring perception, memory, and reasoning to make choices and find optimal policies. Traditional approaches to decision-making suffer from sample efficiency and generalization, while large-scale…
Trained models are often composed with post-hoc transforms such as temperature scaling (TS), ensembling and stochastic weight averaging (SWA) to improve performance, robustness, uncertainty estimation, etc. However, such transforms are…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training technique to incentivize the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can respond very inconsistently to RL finetuning: some show substantial…
Machine learning algorithms increasingly influence our decisions and interact with us in all parts of our daily lives. Therefore, just as we consider the safety of power plants, highways, and a variety of other engineered socio-technical…
Software, while beneficial, poses potential cybersecurity risks due to inherent vulnerabilities. Detecting these vulnerabilities is crucial, and deep learning has shown promise as an effective tool for this task due to its ability to…
Can a small amount of verified goal information steer the expensive self-supervised pretraining of foundation models? Standard pretraining optimizes a fixed proxy objective (e.g., next-token prediction), which can misallocate compute away…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become widely adopted in robot control. Despite many successes, one major persisting problem can be very low data efficiency. One solution is interactive feedback, which has been shown to speed up RL…
Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…
Reasoning-based language models have demonstrated strong performance across various domains, with the most notable gains seen in mathematical and coding tasks. Recent research has shown that reasoning also offers significant benefits for…
Uncertainty calibration is crucial for various machine learning applications, yet it remains challenging. Many models exhibit hallucinations - confident yet inaccurate responses - due to miscalibrated confidence. Here, we show that the…
We study automated intrusion prevention using reinforcement learning. In a novel approach, we formulate the problem of intrusion prevention as an optimal stopping problem. This formulation allows us insight into the structure of the optimal…
Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether it is still helpful to add the self-training method in the pre-training step and the fine-tuning step. Towards…
Probes trained on model activations can detect undesirable behaviors like deception or biases that are difficult to identify from outputs alone. This makes them useful detectors to identify misbehavior. Furthermore, they are also valuable…
A widespread strategy to obtain a language model that performs well on a target domain is to finetune a pretrained model to perform unsupervised next-token prediction on data from that target domain. Finetuning presents two challenges: (i)…
Gradient-based meta-learning has proven to be highly effective at learning model initializations, representations, and update rules that allow fast adaptation from a few samples. The core idea behind these approaches is to use fast…
Early exits enable the network's forward pass to terminate early by attaching trainable internal classifiers to the backbone network. Existing early-exit methods typically adopt either a joint training approach, where the backbone and exit…
Robots are more capable of achieving manipulation tasks for everyday activities than before. But the safety of manipulation skills that robots employ is still an open problem. Considering all possible failures during skill learning…
Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…