← Search

David Daniel Cox

15 accepted papers

2025

Activated LoRA: Fine-tuned LLMs for Intrinsics

NeurIPS 2025poster

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a highly efficient framework for finetuning the weights of large foundation models, and has become the go-to method for data-driven customization of LLMs. Despite the promise of highly customized behaviors and capabilities, switching between relevant LoRAs i…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Satori: Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Action-Thought Enhances LLM Reasoning via Autoregressive Search

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse domains. Recent studies have shown that increasing test-time computation enhances LLMs' reasoning capabilities. This typically involves extensive sampling at inference time guided by an external LLM verif…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Self-MoE: Towards Compositional Large Language Models with Self-Specialized Experts

ICLR 2025poster

We present Self-MoE, an approach that transforms a monolithic LLM into a compositional, modular system of self-specialized experts, named MiXSE (MiXture of Self-specialized Experts). Our approach leverages self-specialization, which constructs expert modules using self-generated synthetic data, each…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

$\textit{Trans-LoRA}$: towards data-free Transferable Parameter Efficient Finetuning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Low-rank adapters (LoRA) and their variants are popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques that closely match full model fine-tune performance while requiring only a small number of additional parameters. These additional LoRA parameters are specific to the base model being adapted. W…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Granite-Function Calling Model: Introducing Function Calling Abilities via Multi-task Learning of Granular Tasks

EMNLP 2024industry

An emergent research trend explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as the backbone of agentic systems (e.g., SWE-Bench, Agent-Bench). To fulfill LLMs’ potential as autonomous agents, they must be able to identify, call, and interact with a variety of external tools and application program i…

2024

SALMON: Self-Alignment with Instructable Reward Models

ICLR 2024poster

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on response demonstrations combined with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) constitutes a powerful paradigm for aligning LLM-based AI agents. However, a significant limitation of such an approach is its dependency on high-quality human annotations, making…

2023

Aligning Model and Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex Representations Improves Model-to-Human Behavioral Alignment and Adversarial Robustness

ICLR 2023top-5%

While some state-of-the-art artificial neural network systems in computer vision are strikingly accurate models of the corresponding primate visual processing, there are still many discrepancies between these models and the behavior of primates on object recognition tasks. Many current models suffer…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2023

Learning to Grow Pretrained Models for Efficient Transformer Training

ICLR 2023top-25%

Scaling transformers has led to significant breakthroughs in many domains, leading to a paradigm in which larger versions of existing models are trained and released on a periodic basis. New instances of such models are typically trained completely from scratch, despite the fact that they are often…

Cited by 67SourcePDFScholar
2023

Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervision

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Recent AI-assistant agents, such as ChatGPT, predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with human annotations and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align the output of large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, ensuring they are helpful, ethical, and reliable. Ho…

2022

Embodied Concept Learner: Self-supervised Learning of Concepts and Mapping through Instruction Following

CoRL 2022poster

Humans, even at a very early age, can learn visual concepts and understand geometry and layout through active interaction with the environment, and generalize their compositions to complete tasks described by natural languages in novel scenes. To mimic such capability, we propose Embodied Concept Le…

Cited by 21SourceScholar
2021

Drawing Robust Scratch Tickets: Subnetworks with Inborn Robustness Are Found within Randomly Initialized Networks

NeurIPS 2021poster

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, i.e., an imperceptible perturbation to the input can mislead DNNs trained on clean images into making erroneous predictions. To tackle this, adversarial training is currently the most effective defense method, by augmenti…

2021

Neural Population Geometry Reveals the Role of Stochasticity in Robust Perception

NeurIPS 2021poster

Adversarial examples are often cited by neuroscientists and machine learning researchers as an example of how computational models diverge from biological sensory systems. Recent work has proposed adding biologically-inspired components to visual neural networks as a way to improve their adversarial…

2021

PARP: Prune, Adjust and Re-Prune for Self-Supervised Speech Recognition

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

Self-supervised speech representation learning (speech SSL) has demonstrated the benefit of scale in learning rich representations for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with limited paired data, such as wav2vec 2.0. We investigate the existence of sparse subnetworks in pre-trained speech SSL models…

Cited by 80SourcePDFScholar
2021

ThreeDWorld: A Platform for Interactive Multi-Modal Physical Simulation

NeurIPS 2021poster

We introduce ThreeDWorld (TDW), a platform for interactive multi-modal physical simulation. TDW enables the simulation of high-fidelity sensory data and physical interactions between mobile agents and objects in rich 3D environments. Unique properties include real-time near-photo-realistic image ren…

Cited by 342SourcecodeScholar
2018

On the Information Bottleneck Theory of Deep Learning

ICLR 2018poster

The practical successes of deep neural networks have not been matched by theoretical progress that satisfyingly explains their behavior. In this work, we study the information bottleneck (IB) theory of deep learning, which makes three specific claims: first, that deep networks undergo two distinct p…