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Ilya Sutskever

29 accepted papers

2025

Scaling and evaluating sparse autoencoders

ICLR 2025oral

Sparse autoencoders provide a promising unsupervised approach for extracting interpretable features from a language model by reconstructing activations from a sparse bottleneck layer. Since language models learn many concepts, autoencoders need to be very large to recover all relevant features. Howe…

2024

Let's Verify Step by Step

ICLR 2024poster

In recent years, large language models have greatly improved in their ability to perform complex multi-step reasoning. However, even state-of-the-art models still regularly produce logical mistakes. To train more reliable models, we can turn either to outcome supervision, which provides feedback for…

2024

Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision

ICML 2024oral

Widely used alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), rely on the ability of humans to supervise model behavior---for example, to evaluate whether a model faithfully followed instructions or generated safe outputs. However, future superhuman models will behave…

Cited by 260SourcePDFScholar
2023

Formal Mathematics Statement Curriculum Learning

ICLR 2023top-25%

We explore the use of expert iteration in the context of language modeling applied to formal mathematics. We show that at same compute budget, expert iteration, by which we mean proof search interleaved with learning, dramatically outperforms proof search only. We also observe that when applied to a…

2023

Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision

ICML 2023poster

We study the capabilities of speech processing systems trained simply to predict large amounts of transcripts of audio on the internet. When scaled to 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervision, the resulting models generalize well to standard benchmarks and are often competitive with p…

2022

GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models

ICML 2022spotlight

Diffusion models have recently been shown to generate high-quality synthetic images, especially when paired with a guidance technique to trade off diversity for fidelity. We explore diffusion models for the problem of text-conditional image synthesis and compare two different guidance strategies: CL…

2021

Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision

ICML 2021oral

State-of-the-art computer vision systems are trained to predict a fixed set of predetermined object categories. This restricted form of supervision limits their generality and usability since additional labeled data is needed to specify any other visual concept. Learning directly from raw text about…

2021

Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation

ICML 2021spotlight

Text-to-image generation has traditionally focused on finding better modeling assumptions for training on a fixed dataset. These assumptions might involve complex architectures, auxiliary losses, or side information such as object part labels or segmentation masks supplied during training. We descri…

2020

Deep Double Descent: Where Bigger Models and More Data Hurt

ICLR 2020poster

We show that a variety of modern deep learning tasks exhibit a "double-descent" phenomenon where, as we increase model size, performance first gets worse and then gets better. Moreover, we show that double descent occurs not just as a function of model size, but also as a function of the number of…

Cited by 1164SourceScholar
2020

Distribution Augmentation for Generative Modeling

ICML 2020poster

We present distribution augmentation (DistAug), a simple and powerful method of regularizing generative models. Our approach applies augmentation functions to data and, importantly, conditions the generative model on the specific function used. Unlike typical data augmentation, DistAug allows usage…

Cited by 65SourcePDFScholar
2020

Generative Pretraining From Pixels

ICML 2020poster

Inspired by progress in unsupervised representation learning for natural language, we examine whether similar models can learn useful representations for images. We train a sequence Transformer to auto-regressively predict pixels, without incorporating knowledge of the 2D input structure. Despite tr…

2020

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

NeurIPS 2020oral

We demonstrate that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even becoming competitive with prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches. Specifically, we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, 10x more than any p…

2019

FFJORD: Free-Form Continuous Dynamics for Scalable Reversible Generative Models

ICLR 2019oral

A promising class of generative models maps points from a simple distribution to a complex distribution through an invertible neural network. Likelihood-based training of these models requires restricting their architectures to allow cheap computation of Jacobian determinants. Alternati…

Cited by 1014SourcePDFScholar
2019

GamePad: A Learning Environment for Theorem Proving

ICLR 2019poster

In this paper, we introduce a system called GamePad that can be used to explore the application of machine learning methods to theorem proving in the Coq proof assistant. Interactive theorem provers such as Coq enable users to construct machine-checkable proofs in a step-by-step manner. Hence, they…

2018

Continuous Adaptation via Meta-Learning in Nonstationary and Competitive Environments

ICLR 2018oral

Ability to continuously learn and adapt from limited experience in nonstationary environments is an important milestone on the path towards general intelligence. In this paper, we cast the problem of continuous adaptation into the learning-to-learn framework. We develop a simple gradient-based meta-…

2018

Emergent Complexity via Multi-Agent Competition

ICLR 2018poster

Reinforcement learning algorithms can train agents that solve problems in complex, interesting environments. Normally, the complexity of the trained agent is closely related to the complexity of the environment. This suggests that a highly capable agent requires a complex environment for training.…

2018

Some Considerations on Learning to Explore via Meta-Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2018workshop

We consider the problem of exploration in meta reinforcement learning. Two new meta reinforcement learning algorithms are suggested: E-MAML and ERL2. Results are presented on a novel environment we call 'Krazy World' and a set of maze environments. We show E-MAML and ERL2 deliver better performance…

Cited by 151SourcecodeScholar
2018

The Importance of Sampling inMeta-Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2018poster

We interpret meta-reinforcement learning as the problem of learning how to quickly find a good sampling distribution in a new environment. This interpretation leads to the development of two new meta-reinforcement learning algorithms: E-MAML and E-$\text{RL}^2$. Results are presented on a new enviro…

2017

Learning online alignments with continuous rewards policy gradient

ICASSP 2017accepted

Sequence-to-sequence models with soft attention had significant success in machine translation, speech recognition, and question answering. Though capable and easy to use, they require that the entirety of the input sequence is available at the beginning of inference, an assumption that is not valid…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2017

One-Shot Imitation Learning

NeurIPS 2017poster

Imitation learning has been commonly applied to solve different tasks in isolation. This usually requires either careful feature engineering, or a significant number of samples. This is far from what we desire: ideally, robots should be able to learn from very few demonstrations of any given task, a…

Cited by 870SourcePDFScholar
2016

An Online Sequence-to-Sequence Model Using Partial Conditioning

NeurIPS 2016poster

Sequence-to-sequence models have achieved impressive results on various tasks. However, they are unsuitable for tasks that require incremental predictions to be made as more data arrives or tasks that have long input sequences and output sequences. This is because they generate an output sequence co…

Cited by 138SourcePDFScholar
2016

Continuous Deep Q-Learning with Model-based Acceleration

ICML 2016poster

Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However, the sample complexity of model-free algorithms, particularly when using high-dimensional function a…

Cited by 1384SourcePDFScholar
2016

Improved Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow

NeurIPS 2016poster

The framework of normalizing flows provides a general strategy for flexible variational inference of posteriors over latent variables. We propose a new type of normalizing flow, inverse autoregressive flow (IAF), that, in contrast to earlier published flows, scales well to high-dimensional latent sp…

2016

InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets

NeurIPS 2016poster

This paper describes InfoGAN, an information-theoretic extension to the Generative Adversarial Network that is able to learn disentangled representations in a completely unsupervised manner. InfoGAN is a generative adversarial network that also maximizes the mutual information between a small subset…

Cited by 5972SourcePDFScholar
2015

An Empirical Exploration of Recurrent Network Architectures

ICML 2015poster

The Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is an extremely powerful sequence model that is often difficult to train. The Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is a specific RNN architecture whose design makes it much easier to train. While wildly successful in practice, the LSTM’s architecture appears to be ad-hoc…

Cited by 2562SourcePDFScholar
2015

Grammar as a Foreign Language

NeurIPS 2015poster

Syntactic constituency parsing is a fundamental problem in naturallanguage processing which has been the subject of intensive researchand engineering for decades. As a result, the most accurate parsersare domain specific, complex, and inefficient. In this paper we showthat the domain agnostic atte…

Cited by 1170SourcePDFScholar