← Search

Micah Carroll

9 accepted papers

2026

Reasoning Models Struggle to Control their Chains of Thought

ICML 2026poster

Instruction following in LLMs captures models' ability to change their visible behaviors as requested by users. Instead, we study models' ability to control their chain-of-thought (CoT). This capability -- CoT controllability -- is undesirable because it could allow models to suppress signs of misbe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Truthfulness Despite Weak Supervision: Evaluating and Training LLMs Using Peer Prediction

ICLR 2026poster

The evaluation and post-training of large language models (LLMs) rely on supervision, but strong supervision for difficult tasks is often unavailable, especially when evaluating strong models. In such cases, models have been demonstrated to exploit evaluation schemes built on such imperfect supervis…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback

ICLR 2025poster

As LLMs become more widely deployed, there is increasing interest in directly optimizing for feedback from end users (e.g. thumbs up) in addition to feedback from paid annotators. However, training to maximize human feedback creates a perverse incentive structure for the AI to resort to manipulative…

2025

Robust and Diverse Multi-Agent Learning via Rational Policy Gradient

NeurIPS 2025poster

Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in the context of multi-agent learning. However, the success of adversarial optimization has been largely limited to zero-sum settings becaus…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

AI Alignment with Changing and Influenceable Reward Functions

ICML 2024poster

Existing AI alignment approaches assume that preferences are static, which is unrealistic: our preferences change, and may even be influenced by our interactions with AI systems themselves. To clarify the consequences of incorrectly assuming static preferences, we introduce Dynamic Reward Markov Dec…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2023

Who Needs to Know? Minimal Knowledge for Optimal Coordination

ICML 2023poster

To optimally coordinate with others in cooperative games, it is often crucial to have information about one’s collaborators: successful driving requires understanding which side of the road to drive on. However, not every feature of collaborators is strategically relevant: the fine-grained accelerat…

2022

Uni[MASK]: Unified Inference in Sequential Decision Problems

NeurIPS 2022accept

Randomly masking and predicting word tokens has been a successful approach in pre-training language models for a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we observe that the same idea also applies naturally to sequential decision making, where many well-studied tasks like behavior cloning, offline…

2019

On the Utility of Learning about Humans for Human-AI Coordination

NeurIPS 2019poster

While we would like agents that can coordinate with humans, current algorithms such as self-play and population-based training create agents that can coordinate with themselves. Agents that assume their partner to be optimal or similar to them can converge to coordination protocols that fail to unde…