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Daniel Fried

48 accepted papers

2026

From Reproduction to Replication: Evaluating Research Agents with Progressive Code Masking

ICLR 2026poster

Recent progress in autonomous code generation has fueled excitement around AI agents capable of accelerating scientific discovery by running experiments. However, there is currently no benchmark that evaluates whether such agents can implement scientific ideas when given varied amounts of code as a…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Generative Value Conflicts Reveal LLM Priorities

ICLR 2026poster

Past work seeks to align large language model (LLM)-based assistants with a target set of values, but such assistants are frequently forced to make tradeoffs *between* values when deployed. In response to the scarcity of value conflict in existing alignment datasets, we introduce ConflictScope, an a…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Hybrid-Gym: Training Coding Agents to Generalize Across Tasks

ICML 2026poster

Coding agents are increasingly used for a wide range of real-world tasks, from adding features and documentation to creating programs from scratch. Ideally, the agent should perform well across all the diverse tasks. However, most prior work concentrates on issue solving, and such single-task traini…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Propose, Solve, Verify: Self-Play Through Formal Verification

ICML 2026poster

Training models through self-play alone (without any human data) has been a longstanding goal in AI, but its effectiveness for training large language models remains unclear, particularly in code generation where rewards based on unit tests are brittle and prone to error propagation. We study self-p…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Toward Training Superintelligent Software Agents through Self-Play SWE-RL

ICML 2026poster

While current software agents powered by large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) can boost programmer productivity, their reliance on human-curated training data and environments creates a fundamental barrier to superintelligence. In this paper, we present Self-play SWE-RL (SSR)…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AutoPresent: Designing Structured Visuals from Scratch

CVPR 2025poster

Designing structured visuals such as presentation slides is essential for communicative needs, necessitating both content creation and visual planning skills. In this work, we tackle the challenge of automated slide generation, where models produce slide presentations from natural language (NL) inst…

2025

BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions

ICLR 2025oral

Task automation has been greatly empowered by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) via Python code, where the tasks range from software engineering development to general-purpose reasoning. While current benchmarks have shown that LLMs can solve tasks using programs like human develop…

Cited by 609SourcePDFScholar
2025

CRScore: Grounding Automated Evaluation of Code Review Comments in Code Claims and Smells

NAACL 2025long

The task of automated code review has recently gained a lot of attention from the machine learning community. However, current review comment evaluation metrics rely on comparisons with a human-written reference for a given code change (also called a diff ). Furthermore, code review is a one-to-many…

2025

CodeRAG-Bench: Can Retrieval Augment Code Generation?

NAACL 2025findings

While language models (LMs) excel at generating code, many programs are difficult to generate using only parametric knowledge. Despite the success of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in text-centric tasks, its potential for code generation remains under-explored. This work introduces CodeRAG-ben…

2025

Dissecting Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LM Agents

ICLR 2025poster

As language models (LMs) are used to build autonomous agents in real environments, ensuring their adversarial robustness becomes a critical challenge. Unlike chatbots, agents are compound systems with multiple components taking actions, which existing LMs safety evaluations do not adequately address…

2025

Human-Aligned Chess With a Bit of Search

ICLR 2025poster

Chess has long been a testbed for AI's quest to match human intelligence, and in recent years, chess AI systems have surpassed the strongest humans at the game. However, these systems are *not human-aligned*; they are unable to match the skill levels of all human partners or model human-like behavio…

2025

Identifying & Interactively Refining Ambiguous User Goals for Data Visualization Code Generation

EMNLP 2025

Establishing shared goals is a fundamental step in human-AI communication. However, ambiguities can lead to outputs that seem correct but fail to reflect the speaker’s intent. In this paper, we explore this issue with a focus on the data visualization domain, where ambiguities in natural language im

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Improving Model Factuality with Fine-grained Critique-based Evaluator

ACL 2025long

Factuality evaluation aims to detect factual errors produced by language models (LMs) and hence guide the development of more factual models. Towards this goal, we train a factuality evaluator, FenCE, that provides LM generators with claim-level factuality feedback. In particular, we train FenCE to…

2025

Repetition Improves Language Model Embeddings

ICLR 2025poster

Bidirectional models are considered essential for strong text embeddings. Recent approaches to adapt autoregressive language models (LMs) into strong text embedding models have largely had the requirement to modify the LM architecture to be bidirectional. We challenge this premise by introducing ``e…

2025

SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolution

NeurIPS 2025poster

The recent DeepSeek-R1 release has demonstrated the immense potential of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the general reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While DeepSeek-R1 and other follow-up work primarily focus on applying RL to competitive coding and math problems, thi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

mrCAD: Multimodal Communication to Refine Computer-aided Designs

EMNLP 2025

In collaborative creation tasks, people steer artifacts towards specific goals by _refining_ them with _multimodal_ communication over multiple rounds of interaction. In contrast, generative AI excels at creating artifacts in a single turn but can struggle to make precise refinements that match our

2024

Amortizing Pragmatic Program Synthesis with Rankings

ICML 2024poster

The usage of Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework has been successful in building *pragmatic* program synthesizers that return programs which, in addition to being logically consistent with user-generated examples, account for the fact that a user chooses their examples informatively. We present a g…

2024

ECCO: Can We Improve Model-Generated Code Efficiency Without Sacrificing Functional Correctness?

EMNLP 2024main

Although large language models (LLMs) have been largely successful in generating functionally correct programs, conditioning models to produce efficient solutions while ensuring correctness remains a challenge. Further, unreliability in benchmarking code efficiency is a hurdle across varying hardwar…

2024

Generating Pragmatic Examples to Train Neural Program Synthesizers

ICLR 2024poster

Programming-by-example is the task of synthesizing a program that is consistent with a set of user-provided input-output examples. As examples are often an under-specification of one's intent, a good synthesizer must choose the intended program from the many that are consistent with the given set o…

2024

Human-Agent Cooperation in Games under Incomplete Information through Natural Language Communication

IJCAI 2024poster

Developing autonomous agents that can strategize and cooperate with humans under information asymmetry is challenging without effective communication in natural language. We introduce a shared-control game, where two players collectively control a token in alternating turns to achieve a common objec…

2024

Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic. Generative Evaluation of Non-Literal Intent Resolution in LLMs

ACL 2024short

Humans often express their communicative intents indirectly or non-literally, which requires their interlocutors—human or AI—to understand beyond the literal meaning of words. While most existing work has focused on discriminative evaluations, we present a new approach to generatively evaluate large…

2024

SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents

ICLR 2024spotlight

*Humans are social beings*; we pursue social goals in our daily interactions, which is a crucial aspect of social intelligence. Yet, AI systems' abilities in this realm remain elusive. We present SOTOPIA, an open-ended environment to simulate complex social interactions between artificial agents and…

Cited by 148SourcePDFScholar
2024

TroVE: Inducing Verifiable and Efficient Toolboxes for Solving Programmatic Tasks

ICML 2024poster

Language models (LMs) can solve tasks such as answering questions about tables or images by writing programs. However, using primitive functions often leads to verbose and error-prone programs, and higher-level functions require expert design. To enable better solutions without human labor, we ask c…

2024

VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic Visual Web Tasks

ACL 2024long

Autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and executing actions on the web offer a promising avenue for automating computer tasks. However, the majority of existing benchmarks primarily focus on text-based agents, neglecting many natural tasks that require visual information to effectively s…

2024

WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents

ICLR 2024poster

With advances in generative AI, there is now potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands. However, current agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, leading to a disconnect with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we build…

2023

API-Assisted Code Generation for Question Answering on Varied Table Structures

EMNLP 2023long main

A persistent challenge to table question answering (TableQA) by generating executable programs has been adapting to varied table structures, typically requiring domain-specific logical forms. In response, this paper introduces a unified TableQA framework that: (1) provides a unified representation f…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Coder Reviewer Reranking for Code Generation

ICML 2023poster

Sampling diverse programs from a code language model and reranking with model likelihood is a popular method for code generation but it is prone to preferring degenerate solutions. Inspired by collaborative programming, we propose Coder-Reviewer reranking. We augment Coder language models from past…

2023

Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization

ACL 2023long

Given a language model (LM), maximum probability is a poor decoding objective for open-ended generation, because it produces short and repetitive text. On the other hand, sampling can often produce incoherent text that drifts from the original topics. We propose contrastive decoding (CD), a reliable…

2023

DS-1000: A Natural and Reliable Benchmark for Data Science Code Generation

ICML 2023poster

We introduce DS-1000, a code generation benchmark with a thousand data science problems spanning seven Python libraries, such as Numpy and Pandas. Compared to prior works, DS-1000 incorporates three core features. First, our problems reflect diverse, realistic, and practical use cases since we colle…

2023

Data Augmentation for Code Translation with Comparable Corpora and Multiple References

EMNLP 2023long findings

One major challenge of translating code between programming languages is that parallel training data is often limited. To overcome this challenge, we present two data augmentation techniques, one that builds comparable corpora (i.e., code pairs with similar functionality), and another that augments…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Execution-Based Evaluation for Open-Domain Code Generation

EMNLP 2023long findings

To extend the scope of coding queries to more realistic settings, we propose ODEX, the first Open-Domain EXecution-based natural language (NL) to Python code generation dataset. ODEX has 945 NL-Code pairs spanning 79 diverse libraries, along with 1,707 human-written test cases for execution. Our NL-…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Grounding Language Models to Images for Multimodal Inputs and Outputs

ICML 2023poster

We propose an efficient method to ground pretrained text-only language models to the visual domain, enabling them to process arbitrarily interleaved image-and-text data, and generate text interleaved with retrieved images. Our method leverages the abilities of language models learnt from large scale…

2023

InCoder: A Generative Model for Code Infilling and Synthesis

ICLR 2023top-25%

Code is seldom written in a single left-to-right pass and is instead repeatedly edited and refined. We introduce InCoder, a unified generative model that can perform program synthesis (via left-to-right generation) as well as editing (via masking and infilling). InCoder is trained to generate code f…

2023

Pragmatic Inference with a CLIP Listener for Contrastive Captioning

ACL 2023findings

We propose a simple yet effective and robust method for contrastive captioning: generating discriminative captions that distinguish target images from very similar alternative distractor images. Our approach is built on a pragmatic inference procedure that formulates captioning as a reference game b…

2023

Pragmatics in Language Grounding: Phenomena, Tasks, and Modeling Approaches

EMNLP 2023long findings

People rely heavily on context to enrich meaning beyond what is literally said, enabling concise but effective communication. To interact successfully and naturally with people, user-facing artificial intelligence systems will require similar skills in pragmatics: relying on various types of context…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Symbolic Planning and Code Generation for Grounded Dialogue

EMNLP 2023long main

Large language models (LLMs) excel at processing and generating text and code. However, LLMs have had limited applicability in grounded task-oriented dialogue as they are difficult to steer toward task objectives and fail to handle novel grounding. We present a modular and interpretable grounded dia…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

G3: Geolocation via Guidebook Grounding

EMNLP 2022finding

We demonstrate how language can improve geolocation: the task of predicting the location where an image was taken. Here we study explicit knowledge from human-written guidebooks that describe the salient and class-discriminative visual features humans use for geolocation. We propose the task of Geol…

2022

Natural Language to Code Translation with Execution

EMNLP 2022main

Generative models of code, pretrained on large corpora of programs, have shown great success in translating natural language to code (Chen et al., 2021; Austin et al., 2021; Li et al., 2022, inter alia). While these models do not explicitly incorporate program semantics (i.e., execution results) dur…

2022

Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMs

EMNLP 2022main

Social intelligence and Theory of Mind (TOM), i.e., the ability to reason about the different mental states, intents, and reactions of all people involved, allows humans to effectively navigate and understand everyday social interactions. As NLP systems are used in increasingly complex social situat…

Cited by 226SourcePDFScholar
2021

Modular Networks for Compositional Instruction Following

NAACL 2021long

Standard architectures used in instruction following often struggle on novel compositions of subgoals (e.g. navigating to landmarks or picking up objects) observed during training. We propose a modular architecture for following natural language instructions that describe sequences of diverse subgoa…

2018

Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigation

NeurIPS 2018poster

Navigation guided by natural language instructions presents a challenging reasoning problem for instruction followers. Natural language instructions typically identify only a few high-level decisions and landmarks rather than complete low-level motor behaviors; much of the missing information must b…

Cited by 589SourcePDFScholar