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Charlie Victor Snell

7 accepted papers

2026

e3: Learning to Explore Enables Extrapolation of Test-Time Compute for LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Test-time scaling offers a promising path to improve LLM reasoning by utilizing more compute at inference time; however, the true promise of this paradigm lies in extrapolation (i.e., improvement in performance on hard problems as LLMs keep "thinking" for longer, beyond the maximum token budget they…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

LMRL Gym: Benchmarks for Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) provide excellent text-generation capabilities, but standard prompting and generation methods generally do not lead to intentional or goal-directed agents and might necessitate considerable prompt tuning. Even the best current LLMs rarely ask clarifying questions, engage…

2025

Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally Can be More Effective than Scaling Parameters for Reasoning

ICLR 2025oral

Enabling LLMs to improve their outputs by using more test-time compute is a critical step towards building self-improving agents that can operate on open-ended natural language. In this paper, we scale up inference-time computation in LLMs, with a focus on answering: if an LLM is allowed to use a fi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Value-Based Deep RL Scales Predictably

ICML 2025poster

Scaling data and compute is critical in modern machine learning. However, scaling also demands _predictability_: we want methods to not only perform well with more compute or data, but also have their performance be predictable from low compute or low data runs, without ever running the large-scale…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

The False Promise of Imitating Proprietary Language Models

ICLR 2024spotlight

An emerging method to cheaply improve a weaker language model is to finetune it on outputs from a stronger model, such as a proprietary system like ChatGPT (e.g., Alpaca, Self-Instruct, and others). In this work, we critically analyze this approach of imitating language models. We first finetune a s…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2023

Non-Programmers Can Label Programs Indirectly via Active Examples: A Case Study with Text-to-SQL

EMNLP 2023long main

Can non-programmers annotate natural language utterances with complex programs that represent their meaning? We introduce APEL, a framework in which non-programmers select among candidate programs generated by a seed semantic parser (e.g., Codex). Since they cannot understand the candidate program…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Offline RL for Natural Language Generation with Implicit Language Q Learning

ICLR 2023poster

Large language models distill broad knowledge from text corpora. However, they can be inconsistent when it comes to completing user specified tasks. This issue can be addressed by finetuning such models via supervised learning on curated datasets, or via reinforcement learning. In this work, we prop…

Cited by 109SourcePDFScholar