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Austin Xu

16 accepted papers

2026

Foundational Automatic Evaluators: Scaling Multi-Task Generative Evaluator Training for Reasoning-Centric Domains

ICLR 2026poster

Finetuning specialized generative evaluators has emerged as a popular paradigm to meet the increasing demand for scalable evaluation during both training and test-time. However, recent work has largely focused on applying new methodology, such as reinforcement learning (RL), to training evaluators,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Least-Loaded Expert Parallelism: Load Balancing An Imbalanced Mixture-of-Experts

ICML 2026poster

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are typically pre-trained with explicit load-balancing constraints to ensure statistically balanced expert routing. Despite this, we observe that even well-trained MoE models exhibit significantly imbalanced routing. This behavior is arguably natural—and even desirabl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LiveResearchBench: Benchmarking Single- and Multi-Agent Systems for Citation-Grounded Deep Research

ICLR 2026poster

Deep research---producing comprehensive, citation-backed reports by searching across hundreds of live websites---marks an important frontier for agentic systems. To rigorously evaluate this ability, three principles are essential: tasks should be (1) user-centric, reflecting realistic information ne…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

MAS-Orchestra: Understanding and Improving Multi-Agent Reasoning Through Holistic Orchestration and Controlled Benchmarks

ICML 2026poster

While multi-agent systems (MAS) promise elevated intelligence through coordination of agents, current approaches to automatic MAS design under-deliver. Such shortcomings stem from two key factors: (1) methodological complexity – agent orchestration is performed using sequential, code-level execution…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MAS-ProVe: Understanding the Process Verification of Multi-Agent Systems

ICML 2026poster

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit high variance in their reasoning trajectories. Process verification, which evaluates intermediate steps in trajectories, has shown promise in general reasoning settings, and has been suggested as a potential tool for guidi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

On the Shelf Life of Finetuned LLM-Judges: Future Proofing, Backward Compatibility, and Question Generalization

ICLR 2026poster

The LLM-as-a-judge paradigm is widely used in both evaluating free-text model responses and reward modeling for model alignment and finetuning. Recently, finetuning judges with judge-specific data has emerged as an often preferred choice over directly prompting frontier models as judges, as the form…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Variation in Verification: Understanding Verification Dynamics in Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances have shown that scaling test-time computation enables large language models (LLMs) to solve increasingly complex problems across diverse domains. One effective paradigm for test-time scaling (TTS) involves LLM generators producing multiple solution candidates, with LLM verifiers asse…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Does Context Matter? ContextualJudgeBench for Evaluating LLM-based Judges in Contextual Settings

ACL 2025long

The large language model (LLM)-as-judge paradigm has been used to meet the demand for a cheap, reliable, and fast evaluation of model outputs during AI system development and post-deployment monitoring. While judge models—LLMs finetuned to specialize in assessing and critiquing model outputs—have be…

2025

Evaluating Judges as Evaluators: The JETTS Benchmark of LLM-as-Judges as Test-Time Scaling Evaluators

ICML 2025poster

Scaling test-time computation, or affording a generator large language model (LLM) extra compute during inference, typically employs the help of external non-generative evaluators (i.e., reward models). Concurrently, LLM-judges, models trained to generate evaluations and critiques (explanations) in…

2025

Topic-Guided Reinforcement Learning with LLMs for Enhancing Multi-Document Summarization

EMNLP 2025

A key challenge in Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) is effectively integrating information from multiple sources while maintaining coherence and topical relevance. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive results in single-document summarization, their performance on MDS still leav

2023

Active metric learning and classification using similarity queries

UAI 2023poster

Active learning is commonly used to train label-efficient models by adaptively selecting the most informative queries. However, most active learning strategies are designed to either learn a representation of the data (e.g., embedding or metric learning) or perform well on a task (e.g., classificati…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2023

HandsOff: Labeled Dataset Generation With No Additional Human Annotations

CVPR 2023highlight

Recent work leverages the expressive power of genera- tive adversarial networks (GANs) to generate labeled syn- thetic datasets. These dataset generation methods often require new annotations of synthetic images, which forces practitioners to seek out annotators, curate a set of synthetic images, an…

2023

Perceptual adjustment queries and an inverted measurement paradigm for low-rank metric learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

We introduce a new type of query mechanism for collecting human feedback, called the perceptual adjustment query (PAQ). Being both informative and cognitively lightweight, the PAQ adopts an inverted measurement scheme, and combines advantages from both cardinal and ordinal queries. We showcase the P…

2022

Delta Distancing: A Lifting Approach to Localizing Items from User Comparisons

ICASSP 2022accepted

A common problem in recommendation systems is to learn a model of user preferences based only on comparisons of the relative attractiveness of different items. We consider this problem in the context of an ideal point model of user preference, where each user can be represented as a point in a low-d…

Cited by 0SourceScholar