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Djallel Bouneffouf

22 accepted papers

2026

ENHANCING VALUE ALIGNMENT OF LLMS WITH MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM AND COMBINATORIAL FUSION

ICASSP 2026oral

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is a central challenge for ensuring trustworthy and safe deployment. While existing methods such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and its variants have improved alignment, they often rely on a single evaluator or narrowly de…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

The Shepherd Test: How Will Super Intelligent Agents Balance Care and Control in Asymmetric Relationships?

AAAI 2026technical

This paper introduces the Shepherd Test, a new conceptual test for assessing the moral and relational dimensions of superintelligent artificial agents. The test is inspired by human interactions with animals, where ethical considerations about care, manipulation, and consumption arise in contexts of

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Wavelength.AI: Extending the Collaborative Game Wavelength as a Testbed for Studying Shared Understanding in Human–Agent Collaboration

IJCAI 2026

AI's increasing role as a personal agent assisting knowledge workers in everyday tasks underscores the need to investigate how to help human–agent teams build a shared understanding. We extend the collaborative "mind-reading" game Wavelength to include an AI teammate, presenting the first demonstrat

Cited by 0Scholar
2025

Evaluating the Prompt Steerability of Large Language Models

NAACL 2025long

Building pluralistic AI requires designing models that are able to be shaped to represent a wide range of value systems and cultures. Achieving this requires first being able to evaluate the degree to which a given model is capable of reflecting various personas. To this end, we propose a benchmark…

2025

Position: Theory of Mind Benchmarks are Broken for Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Our paper argues that the majority of theory of mind benchmarks are broken because of their inability to directly test how large language models (LLMs) adapt to new partners. This problem stems from the fact that theory of mind benchmarks for LLMs are overwhelmingly inspired by the methods used to t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

ComVas: Contextual Moral Values Alignment System

IJCAI 2024poster

In contemporary society, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems into various aspects of daily life raises significant ethical concerns. One critical aspect is to ensure that AI systems align with the moral values of the endusers. To that end, we introduce the Contextual Moral Value…

2024

Interpolating Item and User Fairness in Multi-Sided Recommendations

NeurIPS 2024poster

Today's online platforms heavily lean on algorithmic recommendations for bolstering user engagement and driving revenue. However, these recommendations can impact multiple stakeholders simultaneously---the platform, items (sellers), and users (customers)---each with their unique objectives, making i…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Non-Stationary Bandits with Auto-Regressive Temporal Dependency

NeurIPS 2023poster

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) frameworks, predominantly examined under stochastic or adversarial settings, often overlook the temporal dynamics inherent in many real-world applications such as recommendation systems and online advertising. This paper introduces a novel non-stationary MAB fram…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

Question Answering System with Sparse and Noisy Feedback

ICASSP 2023accepted

The rise of personal assistants has made question answering a very popular mechanism for user-system interaction. In Question Answering System, implicit feedbacks can be easily observed (user clicking in the link given by the QA system), but they are noisy. However, receiving an explicit feedback on…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

SupervisorBot: NLP-Annotated Real-Time Recommendations of Psychotherapy Treatment Strategies with Deep Reinforcement Learning

IJCAI 2023poster

We present a novel recommendation system designed to provide real-time treatment strategies to therapists during psychotherapy sessions. Our system utilizes a turn-level rating mechanism that forecasts the therapeutic outcome by calculating a similarity score between the profound representation of a…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2022

Bandit Limited Discrepancy Search and Application to Machine Learning Pipeline Optimization

AAAI 2022technical

Optimizing a machine learning (ML) pipeline has been an important topic of AI and ML. Despite recent progress, pipeline optimization remains a challenging problem, due to potentially many combinations to consider as well as slow training and validation. We present the BLDS algorithm for optimized al…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Learning to Generate Image Source-Agnostic Universal Adversarial Perturbations

IJCAI 2022poster

Adversarial perturbations are critical for certifying the robustness of deep learning models. A ``universal adversarial perturbation'' (UAP) can simultaneously attack multiple images, and thus offers a more unified threat model, obviating an image-wise attack algorithm. However, the existing UAP gen…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2022

Linearizing contextual bandits with latent state dynamics

UAI 2022poster

In many real-world applications of multi-armed bandit problems, both rewards and contexts are often influenced by confounding latent variables which evolve stochastically over time. While the observed contexts and rewards are nonlinearly related, we show that prior knowledge of latent causal structu…

2021

Double-Linear Thompson Sampling for Context-Attentive Bandits

ICASSP 2021accepted

In this paper, we analyze and extend an online learning frame-work known as Context-Attentive Bandit, motivated by various practical applications, from medical diagnosis to dialog systems, where due to observation costs only a small subset of a potentially large number of context variables can be ob…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Toward Optimal Solution for the Context-Attentive Bandit Problem

IJCAI 2021poster

In various recommender system applications, from medical diagnosis to dialog systems, due to observation costs only a small subset of a potentially large number of context variables can be observed at each iteration; however, the agent has a freedom to choose which variables to observe. In this pap…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2021

Toward Skills Dialog Orchestration with Online Learning

ICASSP 2021accepted

Building multi-domain AI agents is a challenging task and an open problem in the area of AI. Within the domain of dialog, the ability to orchestrate multiple independently trained dialog agents, or skills, to create a unified system is of particular significance. In this work, we study the task of o…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2019

Beyond Backprop: Online Alternating Minimization with Auxiliary Variables

ICML 2019oral

Despite significant recent advances in deep neural networks, training them remains a challenge due to the highly non-convex nature of the objective function. State-of-the-art methods rely on error backpropagation, which suffers from several well-known issues, such as vanishing and exploding gradient…