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Brian R. Bartoldson

14 accepted papers

2026

Get RICH or Die Scaling: Profitably Trading Inference Compute for Robustness

ICLR 2026poster

Models are susceptible to adversarially out-of-distribution (OOD) data despite large training-compute investments into their robustification. Zaremba et al. (2025) make progress on this problem at test time, showing LLM reasoning improves satisfaction of model specifications designed to thwart attac…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

STAR-1: Safer Alignment of Reasoning LLMs with 1K Data

AAAI 2026technical

This paper introduces STAR-1, a high-quality, just-1k-scale safety dataset specifically designed for large reasoning models (LRMs) like DeepSeek-R1. Built on three core principles --- diversity, deliberative reasoning, and rigorous filtering --- STAR-1 aims to address the critical needs for safety a

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Act Only When It Pays: Efficient Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning via Selective Rollouts

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning, such as PPO and GRPO, has powered recent breakthroughs in LLM reasoning. Scaling rollout to sample more prompts enables models to selectively use higher-quality data for training, which can stabilize RL training and improve model performance, but at the cost of significant co…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

ELFS: Label-Free Coreset Selection with Proxy Training Dynamics

ICLR 2025poster

High-quality human-annotated data is crucial for modern deep learning pipelines, yet the human annotation process is both costly and time-consuming. Given a constrained human labeling budget, selecting an informative and representative data subset for labeling can significantly reduce human annotati…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

We study a novel language model architecture that is capable of scaling test-time computation by implicitly reasoning in latent space. Our model works by iterating a recurrent block, thereby unrolling to arbitrary depth at test-time. This stands in contrast to mainstream reasoning models that scale…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Speculative Diffusion Decoding: Accelerating Language Generation through Diffusion

NAACL 2025long

Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted method to accelerate large language model inference without sacrificing the quality of the model outputs. While this technique has facilitated notable speed improvements by enabling parallel sequence verification, its efficiency remains inherently…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on enormous quantities of unlicensed text, a practice that has led to scrutiny due to possible intellectual property infringement and ethical concerns. Training LLMs on openly licensed text presents a first step towards addressing these issues, but…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Trajectory Balance with Asynchrony: Decoupling Exploration and Learning for Fast, Scalable LLM Post-Training

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a critical component of large language model (LLM) post-training. However, on-policy algorithms used for post-training are not naturally robust to a diversified content of experience replay buffers, which asynchronous off-policy actors can efficiently populate in paral…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Adversarial Robustness Limits via Scaling-Law and Human-Alignment Studies

ICML 2024poster

This paper revisits the simple, long-studied, yet still unsolved problem of making image classifiers robust to imperceptible perturbations. Taking CIFAR10 as an example, SOTA clean accuracy is about $100$%, but SOTA robustness to $\ell_{\infty}$-norm bounded perturbations barely exceeds $70$%. To un…

2024

Decoding Compressed Trust: Scrutinizing the Trustworthiness of Efficient LLMs Under Compression

ICML 2024poster

Compressing high-capability Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a favored strategy for resource-efficient inferences. While state-of-the-art (SoTA) compression methods boast impressive advancements in preserving benign task performance, the potential risks of compression in terms of safety a…

2024

NEFTune: Noisy Embeddings Improve Instruction Finetuning

ICLR 2024poster

We show that language model finetuning can be improved, sometimes dramatically, with a simple augmentation. NEFTune adds noise to the embedding vectors during training. Standard finetuning of LLaMA-2-7B using Alpaca achieves $29.79$\% on AlpacaEval, which rises to $64.69$\% using noisy embeddings.…

2024

Transformers Can Do Arithmetic with the Right Embeddings

NeurIPS 2024poster

The poor performance of transformers on arithmetic tasks seems to stem in large part from their inability to keep track of the exact position of each digit inside of a large span of digits. We mend this problem by adding an embedding to each digit that encodes its position relative to the start of t…

2022

Models Out of Line: A Fourier Lens on Distribution Shift Robustness

NeurIPS 2022accept

Improving the accuracy of deep neural networks on out-of-distribution (OOD) data is critical to an acceptance of deep learning in real world applications. It has been observed that accuracies on in-distribution (ID) versus OOD data follow a linear trend and models that outperform this baseline are e…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2021

A Winning Hand: Compressing Deep Networks Can Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness

NeurIPS 2021poster

Successful adoption of deep learning (DL) in the wild requires models to be: (1) compact, (2) accurate, and (3) robust to distributional shifts. Unfortunately, efforts towards simultaneously meeting these requirements have mostly been unsuccessful. This raises an important question: Is the inability…