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Max Bartolo

16 accepted papers

2026

Learning is Forgetting; LLM Training As Lossy Compression

ICLR 2026poster

Despite the increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs), we still have a limited understanding of how their representational spaces are structured. This limits our ability to interpret how and what they learn or relate them to learning in humans. We argue LLMs are best seen as an instance…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Improving Reward Models with Synthetic Critiques

NAACL 2025findings

Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in aligning language models through the process of reinforcement learning from human feedback. RMs are trained to predict a score reflecting human preference, which requires significant time and cost for human annotation. Additionally, RMs tend to quickly ove…

2025

No Need for Explanations: LLMs can implicitly learn from mistakes in-context

EMNLP 2025

Showing incorrect answers to Large Language Models (LLMs) is a popular strategy to improve their performance in reasoning-intensive tasks. It is widely assumed that, in order to be helpful, the incorrect answers must be accompanied by comprehensive rationales, explicitly detailing where the mistakes

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Procedural Knowledge in Pretraining Drives Reasoning in Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the other hand, they show surprising reasoning gaps when…

2025

Reverse Engineering Human Preferences with Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are routinely evaluated by other LLMs trained to predict human preferences. This framework—known as *LLM-as-a-judge*—is highly scalable and relatively low cost. However, it is also vulnerable to malicious exploitation, as LLM responses can be tuned to…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning

ACL 2024long

Datasets are foundational to many breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. Many recent achievements in the space of natural language processing (NLP) can be attributed to the fine-tuning of pre-trained models on a diverse set of tasks that enables a large language model (LLM) to respond to i…

Cited by 94SourcePDFScholar
2024

Fishing for Magikarp: Automatically Detecting Under-trained Tokens in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

The disconnect between tokenizer creation and model training in language models allows for specific inputs, such as the infamous SolidGoldMagikarp token, to induce unwanted model behaviour. Although such ‘glitch tokens’, tokens present in the tokenizer vocabulary but that are nearly or entirely abse…

2024

The PRISM Alignment Dataset: What Participatory, Representative and Individualised Human Feedback Reveals About the Subjective and Multicultural Alignment of Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024oral

Human feedback is central to the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, open questions remain about the methods (how), domains (where), people (who) and objectives (to what end) of feedback processes. To navigate these questions, we introduce PRISM, a new dataset which maps the sociodem…

2023

DataPerf: Benchmarks for Data-Centric AI Development

NeurIPS 2023poster

Machine learning research has long focused on models rather than datasets, and prominent datasets are used for common ML tasks without regard to the breadth, difficulty, and faithfulness of the underlying problems. Neglecting the fundamental importance of data has given rise to inaccuracy, bias, and…

2022

Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity

ACL 2022long

When primed with only a handful of training samples, very large, pretrained language models such as GPT-3 have shown competitive results when compared to fully-supervised, fine-tuned, large, pretrained language models. We demonstrate that the order in which the samples are provided can make the diff…

Cited by 1172SourcePDFScholar
2022

Models in the Loop: Aiding Crowdworkers with Generative Annotation Assistants

NAACL 2022long

In Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection (DADC), human annotators are tasked with finding examples that models struggle to predict correctly. Models trained on DADC-collected training data have been shown to be more robust in adversarial and out-of-domain settings, and are considerably harder for huma…

2022

Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality

CVPR 2022poster

We present a novel task and dataset for evaluating the ability of vision and language models to conduct visio-linguistic compositional reasoning, which we call Winoground. Given two images and two captions, the goal is to match them correctly--but crucially, both captions contain a completely identi…

Cited by 440PDFScholar
2021

Contrasting Human- and Machine-Generated Word-Level Adversarial Examples for Text Classification

EMNLP 2021main

Research shows that natural language processing models are generally considered to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks; but recent work has drawn attention to the issue of validating these adversarial inputs against certain criteria (e.g., the preservation of semantics and grammaticality). Enforcin…

2021

Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP

NAACL 2021long

We introduce Dynabench, an open-source platform for dynamic dataset creation and model benchmarking. Dynabench runs in a web browser and supports human-and-model-in-the-loop dataset creation: annotators seek to create examples that a target model will misclassify, but that another person will not. I…

Cited by 471SourcePDFScholar
2021

Improving Question Answering Model Robustness with Synthetic Adversarial Data Generation

EMNLP 2021main

Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art question answering models remain vulnerable to a variety of adversarial attacks. While dynamic adversarial data collection, in which a human annotator tries to write examples that fool a model-in-the-loop, can improve model robustness, this process is expens…