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Eric Mitchell

22 accepted papers

2026

FSPO: Few-Shot Optimization of Synthetic Preferences Effectively Personalizes to Real Users

ICLR 2026poster

Effective personalization of LLMs is critical for a broad range of user-interfacing applications such as virtual assistants and content curation. Inspired by the strong in-context capabilities of LLMs, we propose few-shot preference optimization (FSPO), an algorithm for LLM personalization that refr…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

A Critical Evaluation of AI Feedback for Aligning Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Learning from AI feedback (LAIF) is a popular paradigm for improving the instruction-following abilities of powerful pre-trained language models. LAIF first performs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using demonstrations from a teacher model and then further fine-tunes the model with reinforcement learni…

2024

An Emulator for Fine-tuning Large Language Models using Small Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Widely used language models (LMs) are typically built by scaling up a two-stage training pipeline: a pre-training stage that uses a very large, diverse dataset of text and a fine-tuning (sometimes, 'alignment') stage that uses targeted examples or other specifications of desired behaviors. While it…

2024

Calibrating Language Models with Adaptive Temperature Scaling

EMNLP 2024main

The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) is not only measured by their ability to generate accurate outputs but also by their calibration—how well their confidence scores reflect the probability of their outputs being correct. While unsupervised pre-training has been shown to yield LLMs wit…

2024

Fine-Tuning Language Models for Factuality

ICLR 2024poster

The fluency and creativity of large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have led to their widespread use, sometimes even as a replacement for traditional search engines. Yet language models are prone to making convincing but factually inaccurate claims, often referred to as `hallucinations.' These er…

2024

Language Model Detectors Are Easily Optimized Against

ICLR 2024poster

The fluency and general applicability of large language models (LLMs) has motivated significant interest in detecting whether a piece of text was written by a language model. While both academic and commercial detectors have been deployed in some settings, particularly education, other research has…

2024

Online Adaptation of Language Models with a Memory of Amortized Contexts

NeurIPS 2024poster

Due to the rapid generation and dissemination of information, large language models (LLMs) quickly run out of date despite enormous development costs. To address the crucial need to keep models updated, online learning has emerged as a critical tool when utilizing LLMs for real-world applications. H…

2024

RLVF: Learning from Verbal Feedback without Overgeneralization

ICML 2024poster

The diversity of contexts in which large language models (LLMs) are deployed requires the ability to modify or customize default model behaviors to incorporate nuanced requirements and preferences. A convenient interface to specify such model adjustments is high-level verbal feedback, such as “Don’t…

2023

DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature

ICML 2023oral

The increasing fluency and widespread usage of large language models (LLMs) highlight the desirability of corresponding tools aiding detection of LLM-generated text. In this paper, we identify a property of the structure of an LLM's probability function that is useful for such detection. Specificall…

2023

Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model

NeurIPS 2023oral

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing methods for gaining such steerability collect human labels of the…

Cited by 3284SourcePDFScholar
2023

Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback

EMNLP 2023short main

A trustworthy real-world prediction system should produce well-calibrated confidence scores; that is, its confidence in an answer should be indicative of the likelihood that the answer is correct, enabling deferral to an expert in cases of low-confidence predictions. Recent studies have shown that u…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Meta-Learning Online Adaptation of Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

Large language models encode impressively broad world knowledge in their parameters. However, the knowledge in static language models falls out of date, limiting the model’s effective “shelf life.” While online fine-tuning can reduce this degradation, we find that naively fine-tuning on a stream of…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

RECKONING: Reasoning through Dynamic Knowledge Encoding

NeurIPS 2023poster

Recent studies on transformer-based language models show that they can answer questions by reasoning over knowledge provided as part of the context (i.e., in-context reasoning). However, since the available knowledge is often not filtered for a particular question, in-context reasoning can be sensit…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Enhancing Self-Consistency and Performance of Pre-Trained Language Models through Natural Language Inference

EMNLP 2022main

While large pre-trained language models are powerful, their predictions often lack logical consistency across test inputs. For example, a state-of-the-art Macaw question-answering (QA) model answers <i>Yes</i> to <i>Is a sparrow a bird?</i> and <i>Does a bird have feet?</i> but answers <i>No</i> to…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2022

Fast Model Editing at Scale

ICLR 2022poster

While large pre-trained models have enabled impressive results on a variety of downstream tasks, the largest existing models still make errors, and even accurate predictions may become outdated over time. Because detecting all such failures at training time is impossible, enabling both developers an…

2022

Memory-Based Model Editing at Scale

ICML 2022spotlight

Even the largest neural networks make errors, and once-correct predictions can become invalid as the world changes. Model editors make local updates to the behavior of base (pre-trained) models to inject updated knowledge or correct undesirable behaviors. Existing model editors have shown promise, b…

2021

Learning Language-Conditioned Robot Behavior from Offline Data and Crowd-Sourced Annotation

CoRL 2021poster

We study the problem of learning a range of vision-based manipulation tasks from a large offline dataset of robot interaction. In order to accomplish this, humans need easy and effective ways of specifying tasks to the robot. Goal images are one popular form of task specification, as they are alread…

Cited by 170SourceScholar
2021

Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Advantage Weighting

ICML 2021spotlight

This paper introduces the offline meta-reinforcement learning (offline meta-RL) problem setting and proposes an algorithm that performs well in this setting. Offline meta-RL is analogous to the widely successful supervised learning strategy of pre-training a model on a large batch of fixed, pre-coll…

2020

Higher Order Function Networks for View Planning and Multi-View Reconstruction

ICRA 2020poster

We consider the problem of planning views for a robot to acquire images of an object for visual inspection and reconstruction. In contrast to offline methods which require a 3D model of the object as input or online methods which rely on only local measurements, our method uses a neural network whic…

Cited by 8SourceScholar
2020

Higher-Order Function Networks for Learning Composable 3D Object Representations

ICLR 2020poster

We present a new approach to 3D object representation where a neural network encodes the geometry of an object directly into the weights and biases of a second 'mapping' network. This mapping network can be used to reconstruct an object by applying its encoded transformation to points randomly sampl…

Cited by 24SourceScholar
2020

Reward Prediction Error as an Exploration Objective in Deep RL

IJCAI 2020poster

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek novel states, driving the agent to discover improved reward. H…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2019

Pixels to Plans: Learning Non-Prehensile Manipulation by Imitating a Planner

IROS 2019poster

We present a novel method enabling robots to quickly learn to manipulate objects by leveraging a motion planner to generate “expert” training trajectories from a small amount of human-labeled data. In contrast to the traditional sense-plan-act cycle, we propose a deep learning architecture and train…

Cited by 9SourceScholar