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Anselm Paulus

10 accepted papers

2026

Differentiable Simulation of Hard Contacts with Soft Gradients for Learning and Control

ICLR 2026poster

Contact forces introduce discontinuities into robot dynamics that severely limit the use of simulators for gradient-based optimization. Penalty-based simulators such as MuJoCo, soften contact resolution to enable gradient computation. However, realistically simulating hard contacts requires stiff so…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Safety Alignment of LMs via Non-cooperative Games

ICML 2026spotlight

Ensuring the safety of language models (LMs) while maintaining their usefulness remains a critical challenge in AI alignment. Current approaches rely on sequential adversarial training: generating adversarial prompts and fine-tuning LMs to defend against them. We introduce a different paradigm: fram…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SoftJAX & SoftTorch: Empowering Automatic Differentiation Libraries with Informative Gradients

ICML 2026oral

Automatic differentiation (AD) frameworks such as JAX and PyTorch have enabled gradient-based optimization for a wide range of scientific fields. Yet, many ''hard'' primitives in these libraries such as thresholding, Boolean logic, discrete indexing, and sorting operations yield zero or undefined gr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AdvPrompter: Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs

ICML 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to **jailbreaking attacks** that lead to generation of inappropriate or harmful content. Manual red-teaming requires a time-consuming search for adversarial prompts, whereas automatic adversarial prompt generation often leads to semantically meaningless a…

2024

LPGD: A General Framework for Backpropagation through Embedded Optimization Layers

ICML 2024poster

Embedding parameterized optimization problems as layers into machine learning architectures serves as a powerful inductive bias. Training such architectures with stochastic gradient descent requires care, as degenerate derivatives of the embedded optimization problem often render the gradients uninf…

2023

Backpropagation through Combinatorial Algorithms: Identity with Projection Works

ICLR 2023poster

Embedding discrete solvers as differentiable layers has given modern deep learning architectures combinatorial expressivity and discrete reasoning capabilities. The derivative of these solvers is zero or undefined, therefore a meaningful replacement is crucial for effective gradient-based learning.…

2021

CombOptNet: Fit the Right NP-Hard Problem by Learning Integer Programming Constraints

ICML 2021spotlight

Bridging logical and algorithmic reasoning with modern machine learning techniques is a fundamental challenge with potentially transformative impact. On the algorithmic side, many NP-hard problems can be expressed as integer programs, in which the constraints play the role of their ’combinatorial sp…

2020

Deep Graph Matching via Blackbox Differentiation of Combinatorial Solvers

ECCV 2020poster

Building on recent progress at the intersection of combinatorial optimization and deep learning, we propose an end-to-end trainable architecture for deep graph matching that contains unmodified combinatorial solvers. Using the presence of heavily optimized combinatorial solvers together with some im…

2020

Differentiation of Blackbox Combinatorial Solvers

ICLR 2020spotlight

Achieving fusion of deep learning with combinatorial algorithms promises transformative changes to artificial intelligence. One possible approach is to introduce combinatorial building blocks into neural networks. Such end-to-end architectures have the potential to tackle combinatorial problems on r…

Cited by 171SourcecodeScholar
2020

Optimizing Rank-Based Metrics With Blackbox Differentiation

CVPR 2020oral

Rank-based metrics are some of the most widely used criteria for performance evaluation of computer vision models. Despite years of effort, direct optimization for these metrics remains a challenge due to their non-differentiable and non-decomposable nature. We present an efficient, theoretically so…

Cited by 121PDFcodeScholar