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Bobak Shahriari

6 accepted papers

2025

BOND: Aligning LLMs with Best-of-N Distillation

ICLR 2025poster

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a key driver of quality and safety in state-of-the-art large language models. Yet, a surprisingly simple and strong inference-time strategy is Best-of-N sampling that selects the best generation among N candidates. In this paper, we propose Best-o…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2025

Capturing Individual Human Preferences with Reward Features

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for disagreement, like in the training of large language models. We formal…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Learning from negative feedback, or positive feedback or both

ICLR 2025spotlight

Existing preference optimization methods often assume scenarios where paired preference feedback (preferred/positive vs. dis-preferred/negative examples) is available. This requirement limits their applicability in scenarios where only unpaired feedback—for example, either positive or negative— is a…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Critic Regularized Regression

NeurIPS 2020poster

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, offers the prospect of policy optimization from large pre-recorded datasets without online environment interaction. It addresses challenges with regard to the cost of data collection and safety, both of which are particularly pertinent to…

Cited by 378SourcePDFScholar
2020

Making Efficient Use of Demonstrations to Solve Hard Exploration Problems

ICLR 2020poster

This paper introduces R2D3, an agent that makes efficient use of demonstrations to solve hard exploration problems in partially observable environments with highly variable initial conditions. We also introduce a suite of eight tasks that combine these three properties, and show that R2D3 can solve…

Cited by 107SourceScholar
2016

Unbounded Bayesian Optimization via Regularization

AISTATS 2016poster

Bayesian optimization has recently emerged as a powerful and flexible tool in machine learning for hyperparameter tuning and more generally for the efficient global optimization of expensive black box functions. The established practice requires a user-defined bounded domain, which is assumed to con…