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Alane Suhr

21 accepted papers

2026

Representational Similarity and Model Behavior in Multi-Agent Interaction

ICML 2026poster

Researchers have shown that neural similarity among humans predicts social closeness and cooperative success, whereas innovation often emerges from interactions among dissimilar individuals. We investigate whether these principles extend to artificial intelligence by examining interactions between l…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ThreadWeaver: Adaptive Threading for Efficient Parallel Reasoning in Language Models

ICML 2026oral

Scaling inference-time computation has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve strong reasoning performance, but their inherently sequential decoding incurs substantial latency, motivating parallelization of the generation process. However, existing parallel reasoning approaches suffer from …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

V1: Unifying Generation and Self-Verification for Parallel Reasoners

ICML 2026poster

Test-time scaling for complex reasoning tasks shows that leveraging inference-time compute, for example by independently sampling and aggregating multiple solutions, results in significantly better task outcomes. However, a critical bottleneck is _verification_: sampling is only effective if correct…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AutoPresent: Designing Structured Visuals from Scratch

CVPR 2025poster

Designing structured visuals such as presentation slides is essential for communicative needs, necessitating both content creation and visual planning skills. In this work, we tackle the challenge of automated slide generation, where models produce slide presentations from natural language (NL) inst…

2025

Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gym

ICML 2025poster

We present SWE-Gym, the first environment for training real-world software engineering (SWE) agents. SWE-Gym contains 2,438 real-world Python task instances, each comprising a codebase with an executable runtime environment, unit tests, and a task specified in natural language. We use SWE-Gym to tra…

2024

DigiRL: Training In-The-Wild Device-Control Agents with Autonomous Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Pre-trained vision language models (VLMs), though powerful, typically lack training on decision-centric data, rendering them sub-optimal for decision-making tasks such as in-the-wild device control through Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) when used off-the-shelf. While training with static demonstra…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2024

Fine-Tuning Large Vision-Language Models as Decision-Making Agents via Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large vision-language models (VLMs) fine-tuned on specialized visual instruction-following data have exhibited impressive language reasoning capabilities across various scenarios. However, this fine-tuning paradigm may not be able to efficiently learn optimal decision-making agents in multi-step goa…

Cited by 68SourcePDFScholar
2024

Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting

ICLR 2024poster

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted as a fundamental component of language technologies, it is crucial to accurately characterize their performance. Because choices in prompt design can strongly influence model behavior, this design process is critical in effectively using any modern pre-tra…

2024

UNcommonsense Reasoning: Abductive Reasoning about Uncommon Situations

NAACL 2024long

Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the ability to model unusual, unexpected, and unlikely situatio…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Using Language Models to Disambiguate Lexical Choices in Translation

EMNLP 2024main

In translation, a concept represented by a single word in a source language can have multiple variations in a target language. The task of lexical selection requires using context to identify which variation is most appropriate for a source text. We work with native speakers of nine languages to cre…

2024

What's In My Big Data?

ICLR 2024spotlight

Large text corpora are the backbone of language models. However, we have a limited understanding of the content of these corpora, including general statistics, quality, social factors, and inclusion of evaluation data (contamination). In this work, we propose What's In My Big Data? (WIMBD), a platfo…

2023

Do Embodied Agents Dream of Pixelated Sheep: Embodied Decision Making using Language Guided World Modelling

ICML 2023poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically learn tabula rasa, without prior knowledge of the world. However, if initialized with knowledge of high-level subgoals and transitions between subgoals, RL agents could utilize this Abstract World Model (AWM) for planning and exploration. We propose using…

Cited by 93SourcePDFScholar
2023

Fine-Grained Human Feedback Gives Better Rewards for Language Model Training

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)---where human preference judgments on LM outputs are transformed into a learning signal---has recently shown promise…

2023

Minding Language Models’ (Lack of) Theory of Mind: A Plug-and-Play Multi-Character Belief Tracker

ACL 2023long

Theory of Mind (ToM)—the ability to reason about the mental states of other people—is a key element of our social intelligence. Yet, despite their ever more impressive performance, large-scale neural language models still lack basic theory of mind capabilities out-of-the-box. We posit that simply sc…

2023

We're Afraid Language Models Aren't Modeling Ambiguity

EMNLP 2023long main

Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language models are increasingly employed as dialogue interfaces and wr…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

Abstract Visual Reasoning with Tangram Shapes

EMNLP 2022main

We introduce KiloGram, a resource for studying abstract visual reasoning in humans and machines. Drawing on the history of tangram puzzles as stimuli in cognitive science, we build a richly annotated dataset that, with >1k distinct stimuli, is orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than prior r…

Cited by 43SourcePDFScholar
2021

Analysis of Language Change in Collaborative Instruction Following

EMNLP 2021finding

We analyze language change over time in a collaborative, goal-oriented instructional task, where utility-maximizing participants form conventions and increase their expertise. Prior work studied such scenarios mostly in the context of reference games, and consistently found that language complexity…

2019

TOUCHDOWN: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environments

CVPR 2019poster

We study the problem of jointly reasoning about language and vision through a navigation and spatial reasoning task. We introduce the Touchdown task and dataset, where an agent must first follow navigation instructions in a Street View environment to a goal position, and then guess a location in its…

Cited by 433PDFcodeScholar