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Akbir Khan

10 accepted papers

2026

Programming by Backprop: Learning Behaviour from Symbolic Descriptions

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained to acquire behaviours from demonstrations or experience, yet much of their training data consists of symbolic descriptions: instructions, rules, and strategies that specify procedures without examples. We investigate whether LLMs can learn to execut…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Adaptive Deployment of Untrusted LLMs Reduces Distributed Threats

ICLR 2025poster

As large language models (LLMs) grow more powerful, they also become more difficult to trust. They could be either aligned with human intentions, or exhibit "subversive misalignment" -- introducing subtle errors that bypass safety checks. Although individual errors may not immediately cause harm, ea…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games

ICLR 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) possess extensive knowledge and exhibit promising reasoning abilities, however, they still struggle to perform well in complex, dynamic environments. Real-world tasks require handling intricate interactions, advanced spatial reasoning, l…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2025

Language Models Learn to Mislead Humans via RLHF

ICLR 2025poster

Language models (LMs) can produce errors that are hard to detect for humans, especially when the task is complex. RLHF, the most popular post-training method, may exacerbate this problem: to achieve higher rewards, LMs might get better at convincing humans that they are right even when they are wron…

2024

Debating with More Persuasive LLMs Leads to More Truthful Answers

ICML 2024oral

Common methods for aligning large language models (LLMs) with desired behaviour heavily rely on human-labelled data. However, as models grow increasingly sophisticated, they will surpass human expertise, and the role of human evaluation will evolve into non-experts overseeing experts. In anticipatio…

2024

JaxMARL: Multi-Agent RL Environments and Algorithms in JAX

NeurIPS 2024poster

Benchmarks are crucial in the development of machine learning algorithms, significantly influencing reinforcement learning (RL) research through the available environments. Traditionally, RL environments run on the CPU, which limits their scalability with the computational resources typically availa…

2024

Melting Pot Contest: Charting the Future of Generalized Cooperative Intelligence

NeurIPS 2024poster

Multi-agent AI research promises a path to develop human-like and human-compatible intelligent technologies that complement the solipsistic view of other approaches, which mostly do not consider interactions between agents. Aiming to make progress in this direction, the Melting Pot contest 2023 focu…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

MAESTRO: Open-Ended Environment Design for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2023poster

Open-ended learning methods that automatically generate a curriculum of increasingly challenging tasks serve as a promising avenue toward generally capable reinforcement learning agents. Existing methods adapt curricula independently over either environment parameters (in single-agent settings) or c…

Cited by 41SourcePDFScholar
2023

The Goldilocks of Pragmatic Understanding: Fine-Tuning Strategy Matters for Implicature Resolution by LLMs

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Despite widespread use of LLMs as conversational agents, evaluations of performance fail to capture a crucial aspect of communication: interpreting language in context---incorporating its pragmatics. Humans interpret language using beliefs and prior knowledge about the world. For example, we intuiti…