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Michael Noukhovitch

8 accepted papers

2026

Gradient Regularization Prevents Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and Verifiable Rewards

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLFH) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs). A common problem is reward hacking, where the policy may exploit inaccuracies of the reward and learn an unintended behavior. Most previous works add…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Asynchronous RLHF: Faster and More Efficient Off-Policy RL for Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

The dominant paradigm for RLHF is *online* and *on-policy* RL: synchronously generating from the large language model (LLM) policy, labelling with a reward model, and learning using feedback on the LLM's own outputs. While performant, this paradigm is computationally inefficient. Inspired by classic…

2025

Compositional Discrete Latent Code for High Fidelity, Productive Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

We argue that diffusion models' success in modeling complex distributions is, for the most part, coming from their conditioning. This paper investigates the representation used to condition diffusion models from the perspective that ideal representations should improve modeling the data distribution…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Learning Multi-Agent Communication with Contrastive Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Communication is a powerful tool for coordination in multi-agent RL. But inducing an effective, common language is a difficult challenge, particularly in the decentralized setting. In this work, we introduce an alternative perspective where communicative messages sent between agents are considered a…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2023

Language Model Alignment with Elastic Reset

NeurIPS 2023poster

Finetuning language models with reinforcement learning (RL), e.g. from human feedback (HF), is a prominent method for alignment. But optimizing against a reward model can improve on reward while degrading performance in other areas, a phenomenon known as reward hacking, alignment tax, or language dr…

2023

Simplicial Embeddings in Self-Supervised Learning and Downstream Classification

ICLR 2023top-25%

Simplicial Embeddings (SEM) are representations learned through self-supervised learning (SSL), wherein a representation is projected into $L$ simplices of $V$ dimensions each using a \texttt{softmax} operation. This procedure conditions the representation onto a constrained space during pretraining…

2021

Pretraining Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Data efficiency is a key challenge for deep reinforcement learning. We address this problem by using unlabeled data to pretrain an encoder which is then finetuned on a small amount of task-specific data. To encourage learning representations which capture diverse aspects of the underlying MDP, we em…

2019

Systematic Generalization: What Is Required and Can It Be Learned?

ICLR 2019poster

Numerous models for grounded language understanding have been recently proposed, including (i) generic models that can be easily adapted to any given task and (ii) intuitively appealing modular models that require background knowledge to be instantiated. We compare both types of models in how much t…