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Johan Ferret

10 accepted papers

2025

BOND: Aligning LLMs with Best-of-N Distillation

ICLR 2025poster

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a key driver of quality and safety in state-of-the-art large language models. Yet, a surprisingly simple and strong inference-time strategy is Best-of-N sampling that selects the best generation among N candidates. In this paper, we propose Best-o…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2025

Diversity-Rewarded CFG Distillation

ICLR 2025poster

Generative models are transforming creative domains such as music generation, with inference-time strategies like Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) playing a crucial role. However, CFG doubles inference cost while limiting originality and diversity across generated contents. In this paper, we introduce…

2025

On Teacher Hacking in Language Model Distillation

ICML 2025poster

Post-training of language models (LMs) increasingly relies on the following two stages: (i) knowledge distillation, where the LM is trained to imitate a larger teacher LM, and (ii) reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where the LM is aligned by optimizing a reward model. In the second…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Conditional Language Policy: A General Framework For Steerable Multi-Objective Finetuning

EMNLP 2024finding

Reward-based finetuning is crucial for aligning language policies with intended behaviors (*e.g.*, creativity and safety). A key challenge is to develop steerable language models that trade-off multiple (conflicting) objectives in a flexible and efficient manner. This paper presents Conditional Lang…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

RLAIF vs. RLHF: Scaling Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with AI Feedback

ICML 2024poster

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, but gathering high-quality preference labels is expensive. RL from AI Feedback (RLAIF), introduced in Bai et al. (2022b), offers a promising alternative that trains…

Cited by 99SourcePDFScholar
2024

WARM: On the Benefits of Weight Averaged Reward Models

ICML 2024poster

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) can lead to reward hacking, where LLMs exploit failures in the reward model (RM) to achieve seemingly high rewards without meeting the underlying objectives. We identify two primary challenges when des…

Cited by 76SourcePDFScholar
2023

Factually Consistent Summarization via Reinforcement Learning with Textual Entailment Feedback

ACL 2023long

Despite the seeming success of contemporary grounded text generation systems, they often tend to generate factually inconsistent text with respect to their input. This phenomenon is emphasized in tasks like summarization, in which the generated summaries should be corroborated by their source articl…

Cited by 82SourcePDFScholar
2021

Adversarially Guided Actor-Critic

ICLR 2021poster

Despite definite success in deep reinforcement learning problems, actor-critic algorithms are still confronted with sample inefficiency in complex environments, particularly in tasks where efficient exploration is a bottleneck. These methods consider a policy (the actor) and a value function (the cr…

2021

There Is No Turning Back: A Self-Supervised Approach for Reversibility-Aware Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

We propose to learn to distinguish reversible from irreversible actions for better informed decision-making in Reinforcement Learning (RL). From theoretical considerations, we show that approximate reversibility can be learned through a simple surrogate task: ranking randomly sampled trajectory even…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2020

Self-Attentional Credit Assignment for Transfer in Reinforcement Learning

IJCAI 2020poster

The ability to transfer knowledge to novel environments and tasks is a sensible desiderata for general learning agents. Despite the apparent promises, transfer in RL is still an open and little exploited research area. In this paper, we take a brand-new perspective about transfer: we suggest that th…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar