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Jeffrey Li

12 accepted papers

2026

BabyVLM-V2: Toward Developmentally Grounded Pretraining and Benchmarking of Vision Foundation Models

CVPR 2026

Early children's developmental trajectories set up a natural goal for sample-efficient pretraining of vision foundation models. We introduce BabyVLM-V2, a developmentally grounded framework for infant-inspired vision-language modeling that extensively improves upon BabyVLM-V1 through a longitudinal,

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Models

ICLR 2026oral

Reasoning models have made rapid progress on many benchmarks involving math, code, and science. Yet, there are still many open questions about the best train- ing recipes for reasoning since state-of-the-art models often rely on proprietary datasets with little to no public information available. To…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfaces

ICLR 2026poster

AI agents may soon become capable of autonomously completing valuable, long-horizon tasks in diverse domains. Current benchmarks either do not measure real-world tasks, or are not sufficiently difficult to meaningfully measure frontier models. To this end, we present Terminal-Bench 1.5: a carefully…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Language models scale reliably with over-training and on downstream tasks

ICLR 2025poster

Scaling laws are useful guides for derisking expensive training runs, as they predict performance of large models using cheaper, small-scale experiments. However, there remain gaps between current scaling studies and how language models are ultimately trained and evaluated. For instance, scaling is…

2025

SDS – See it, Do it, Sorted: Quadruped Skill Synthesis from Single Video Demonstration

CoRL 2025poster

Imagine a robot learning locomotion skills from any single video, without labels or reward engineering. We introduce SDS ("See it. Do it. Sorted."), an automated pipeline for skill acquisition from unstructured video demonstrations. Using GPT-4o, SDS applies novel prompting techniques, in the form o…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

TiC-LM: A Web-Scale Benchmark for Time-Continual LLM Pretraining

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on historical web data inevitably become outdated. We investigate evaluation strategies and update methods for LLMs as new data becomes available. We introduce a web-scale dataset for time-continual pretraining of LLMs derived from 114 dumps of Common Crawl (CC)…

2024

Better Alignment with Instruction Back-and-Forth Translation

EMNLP 2024finding

We propose a new method, instruction back-and-forth translation, to improve the quality of instruction-tuning data used for aligning large language models (LLMs). Given preprocessed texts from an initial web corpus (e.g. Dolma (Soldaini et al., 2024)), we generate synthetic instructions using the ba…

2024

DataComp-LM: In search of the next generation of training sets for language models

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce DataComp for Language Models, a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models. As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad s…

Cited by 64SourcePDFScholar
2024

Stronger Than You Think: Benchmarking Weak Supervision on Realistic Tasks

NeurIPS 2024poster

Weak supervision (WS) is a popular approach for label-efficient learning, leveraging diverse sources of noisy but inexpensive *weak labels* to automatically annotate training data. Despite its wide usage, WS and its practical value are challenging to benchmark due to the many knobs in its setup, inc…

2023

Characterizing the Impacts of Semi-supervised Learning for Weak Supervision

NeurIPS 2023poster

Labeling training data is a critical and expensive step in producing high accuracy ML models, whether training from scratch or fine-tuning. To make labeling more efficient, two major approaches are programmatic weak supervision (WS) and semi-supervised learning (SSL). More recent works have either…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2021

A Learning Theoretic Perspective on Local Explainability

ICLR 2021poster

In this paper, we explore connections between interpretable machine learning and learning theory through the lens of local approximation explanations. First, we tackle the traditional problem of performance generalization and bound the test-time predictive accuracy of a model using a notion of how l…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar