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Arash Ahmadian

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

Calibrated Value-Aware Model Learning with Probabilistic Environment Models

ICML 2025poster

The idea of value-aware model learning, that models should produce accurate value estimates, has gained prominence in model-based reinforcement learning. The MuZero loss, which penalizes a model's value function prediction compared to the ground-truth value function, has been utilized in several pro…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Self-Improving Robust Preference Optimization

ICLR 2025poster

Online and offline $\mathtt{RLHF}$ methods, such as $\mathtt{PPO}$ and $\mathtt{DPO}$, have been highly successful in aligning AI with human preferences. Despite their success, however, these methods suffer from fundamental limitations: $\mathbf{(a)}$ Models trained with $\mathtt{RLHF}$ can learn fr…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Back to Basics: Revisiting REINFORCE-Style Optimization for Learning from Human Feedback in LLMs

ACL 2024long

AI alignment in the shape of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly treated as a crucial ingredient for high performance large language models. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been installed by the seminal literature as the standard method for the RL part of RLHF. H…

Cited by 174SourcePDFScholar
2024

Contrastive Policy Gradient: Aligning LLMs on sequence-level scores in a supervised-friendly fashion

EMNLP 2024main

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often simpler, more stable, and computationally lighter, can more dir…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Pushing Mixture of Experts to the Limit: Extremely Parameter Efficient MoE for Instruction Tuning

ICLR 2024poster

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) is a widely known neural architecture where an ensemble of specialized sub-models optimizes overall performance with a constant computational cost. However, conventional MoEs pose challenges at scale due to the need to store all experts in memory. In this paper, we push…

2024

RLHF Can Speak Many Languages: Unlocking Multilingual Preference Optimization for LLMs

EMNLP 2024main

Preference optimization techniques have become a standard final stage for training state-of-art large language models (LLMs). However, despite widespread adoption, the vast majority of work to-date has focused on a small set of high-resource languages like English and Chinese. This captures a small…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2024

The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm

EMNLP 2024main

A key concern with the concept of *“alignment”* is the implicit question of *“alignment to what?”*. AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally, preference training and safety measures often overfit to har…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2023

Intriguing Properties of Quantization at Scale

NeurIPS 2023poster

Emergent properties have been widely adopted as a term to describe behavior not present in smaller models but observed in larger models (Wei et al., 2022a). Recent work suggests that the trade-off incurred by quantization is also an emergent property, with sharp drops in performance in models over…

Cited by 38SourcePDFScholar
2023

Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck Convolution for Darts Search Space

ICASSP 2023accepted

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based neural architecture search method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this…

Cited by 0SourceScholar