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Mehul Damani

7 accepted papers

2026

Beyond Binary Rewards: Training LMs to Reason About Their Uncertainty

ICLR 2026poster

When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to generate natural language “reasoning chains”, their performance improves on a variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful applications of RL for reasoning use binary reward functions that evalua…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Escaping the Mode: Multi-Answer Reinforcement Learning in LMs

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LMs) are typically post-trained via RL to produce a single best answer per query, implicitly optimizing for modal correctness. While effective for benchmark accuracy, this approach is unideal for many applications of interest such as in medical diagnosis, which would benefit f…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Position: It’s Time to Optimize for Self-Consistency

ICML 2026poster

Despite ever-increasing sophistication in language model (LM) pre- and post-training pipelines, many important failures persist: models overcondition on user framing (“sycophancy”), exhibit incomplete logical generalization, and produce confident but incorrect responses. We argue that these failures…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Learning How Hard to Think: Input-Adaptive Allocation of LM Computation

ICLR 2025poster

Computationally intensive decoding procedures---including search, reranking, and self-critique---can improve the quality of language model (LM) outputs in problems spanning code generation, numerical reasoning, and dialog. Existing work typically applies the same decoding procedure for every input t…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Surprising Effectiveness of Test-Time Training for Few-Shot Learning

ICML 2025poster

Language models (LMs) have shown impressive performance on tasks within their training distribution, but often struggle with structurally novel tasks even when given a small number of in-context task examples. We investigate the effectiveness of test-time training (TTT)—temporarily updating model pa…

2021

PRIMAL$_2$: Pathfinding Via Reinforcement and Imitation Multi-Agent Learning - Lifelong

RA-L 2021

Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is an indispensable component of large-scale robot deployments in numerous domains ranging from airport management to warehouse automation. In particular, this work addresses lifelong MAPF (LMAPF) - an online variant of the problem where agents are immediately assigne

Cited by 189SourceScholar