← Search

Natasha Jaques

32 accepted papers

2026

AutoCode: LLMs as Problem Setters for Competitive Programming

ICLR 2026poster

Writing competitive programming problems is exacting. Authors must: set constraints, input distributions, and edge cases that rule out shortcuts; target specific algorithms (e.g., max-flow, dynamic programming, data structures); and calibrate complexity beyond the reach of most competitors. We argue…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Chasing Moving Targets with Online Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Safer Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Conventional large language model (LLM) safety alignment relies on a reactive, disjoint loop: attackers exploit a static model, then defenders patch exposed vulnerabilities. This sequential setup leads to attackers overfitting obsolete exploits while defenders perpetually lag behind emerging threats…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Generative Adversarial Post-Training Mitigates Reward Hacking in Live Human-AI Music Interaction

ICLR 2026poster

Most applications of generative AI involve a sequential interaction in which a person inputs a prompt and waits for a response, and where reaction time and adaptivity are not important factors. In contrast, live jamming is a collaborative interaction that requires real-time coordination and adaptati…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Improving Human-AI Coordination through Online Adversarial Training and Generative Models

ICLR 2026poster

Being able to cooperate with diverse humans is an important component of many economically valuable AI tasks, from household robotics to autonomous driving. However, generalizing to novel humans requires training on data that captures the diversity of human behaviors. Adversarial training is a promi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning to summarize user information for personalized reinforcement learning from human feedback

ICLR 2026poster

As everyday use cases of large language model (LLM) AI assistants have expanded, it is becoming increasingly important to personalize responses to align to different users' preferences and goals. While reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is effective at improving LLMs to be generally m…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Maximizing mutual information between prompt and response improves LLM performance with no additional data

ICML 2026poster

While post-training has successfully improved large language models across a variety of domains from open-ended text generation to mathematics, these gains heavily rely on human-labeled data or external verifiers. Existing data has already been exploited and new high-quality data is expensive to col…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Position: Solipsistic superintelligence is unlikely to be cooperative

ICML 2026poster

AI's central challenge is shifting from capability to coexistence. The dominant paradigm in AI research focuses on developing powerful agents under stationary-environment assumptions, treating the world as an exogenous source of feedback. This position paper argues that a solipsistic superintelligen…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RLVE: Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning for Language Models with Adaptive Verifiable Environments

ICML 2026poster

We introduce Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Adaptive Verifiable Environments (RLVE), an approach using verifiable environments that procedurally generate problems and provide algorithmically verifiable rewards, to scale up RL for language models (LMs). RLVE enables each verifiable environment to d…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SPIRAL: Self-Play on Zero-Sum Games Incentivizes Reasoning via Multi-Agent Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have shown that language models can develop sophisticated reasoning through training on tasks with verifiable rewards, but these approaches depend on human-curated problem-answer pairs and domain-specific reward engineering. We introduce SPIRAL, a self-play…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis

ICRA 2025

Achieving human-level performance on real world tasks is a north star for the robotics community. We present the first learned robot agent that reaches amateur humanlevel performance in competitive table tennis. Table tennis is a physically demanding sport that takes humans years to master. We contr

Cited by 43SourceScholar
2025

Consistently Simulating Human Personas with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human users in interactive settings such as therapy, education, and social role-play. While these simulations enable scalable training and evaluation of AI agents, off-the-shelf LLMs often drift from their assigned personas, contradict e…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Cross-environment Cooperation Enables Zero-shot Multi-agent Coordination

ICML 2025oral

Zero-shot coordination (ZSC), the ability to adapt to a new partner in a cooperative task, is a critical component of human-compatible AI. While prior work has focused on training agents to cooperate on a single task, these specialized models do not generalize to new tasks, even if they are highly s…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Enhancing Personalized Multi-Turn Dialogue with Curiosity Reward

NeurIPS 2025poster

Effective conversational agents must personalize their interactions to adapt to user preferences, personalities, and attributes across diverse domains like education and healthcare. Current methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often prioritize helpfulness and safety but fa…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Evaluating Generalization Capabilities of LLM-Based Agents in Mixed-Motive Scenarios Using Concordia

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for social interaction and are increasingly being deployed in situations where they might engage with both human and artificial agents. These interactions represent a critical frontier for LLM-based agents, yet existing eval…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Infer Human’s Intentions Before Following Natural Language Instructions

AAAI 2025technical

For AI agents to be helpful to humans, they should be able to follow natural language instructions to complete everyday cooperative tasks in human environments. However, real human instructions inherently possess ambiguity, because the human speakers assume sufficient prior knowledge about their hid…

2025

InvestESG: A multi-agent reinforcement learning benchmark for studying climate investment as a social dilemma

ICLR 2025poster

**InvestESG** is a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) benchmark designed to study the impact of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure mandates on corporate climate investments. The benchmark models an intertemporal social dilemma where companies balance short-term profi…

2025

Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Satellite Assignment Problems

AAAI 2025technical

Assignment problems are a classic combinatorial optimization problem in which a group of agents must be assigned to a group of tasks such that maximum utility is achieved while satisfying assignment constraints. Given the utility of each agent completing each task, polynomial-time algorithms exist t…

2024

Adaptive Accompaniment with ReaLchords

ICML 2024poster

Jamming requires coordination, anticipation, and collaborative creativity between musicians. Current generative models of music produce expressive output but are not able to generate in an online manner, meaning simultaneously with other musicians (human or otherwise). We propose ReaLchords, an onli…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning to Cooperate with Humans using Generative Agents

NeurIPS 2024poster

Training agents that can coordinate zero-shot with humans is a key mission in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Current algorithms focus on training simulated human partner policies which are then used to train a Cooperator agent. The simulated human is produced either through behavior clon…

2024

Melting Pot Contest: Charting the Future of Generalized Cooperative Intelligence

NeurIPS 2024poster

Multi-agent AI research promises a path to develop human-like and human-compatible intelligent technologies that complement the solipsistic view of other approaches, which mostly do not consider interactions between agents. Aiming to make progress in this direction, the Melting Pot contest 2023 focu…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Moral Foundations of Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Moral foundations theory (MFT) is a psychological assessment tool that decomposes human moral reasoning into five factors, including care/harm, liberty/oppression, and sanctity/degradation (Graham et al., 2009). People vary in the weight they place on these dimensions when making moral decisions, in…

2024

Personalizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with Variational Preference Learning

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a powerful paradigm for aligning foundation models to human values and preferences. However, current RLHF techniques cannot account for the naturally occurring differences in individual human preferences across a diverse population. When these dif…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2022

Less Is More: Generating Grounded Navigation Instructions From Landmarks

CVPR 2022poster

We study the automatic generation of navigation instructions from 360-degree images captured on indoor routes. Existing generators suffer from poor visual grounding, causing them to rely on language priors and hallucinate objects. Our MARKY-MT5 system addresses this by focusing on visual landmarks;…

Cited by 61PDFcodeScholar
2021

Emergent Social Learning via Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2021spotlight

Social learning is a key component of human and animal intelligence. By taking cues from the behavior of experts in their environment, social learners can acquire sophisticated behavior and rapidly adapt to new circumstances. This paper investigates whether independent reinforcement learning (RL) ag…

2021

Environment Generation for Zero-Shot Compositional Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Many real-world problems are compositional – solving them requires completing interdependent sub-tasks, either in series or in parallel, that can be represented as a dependency graph. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often struggle to learn such complex tasks due to the long time horizons and…

2021

PsiPhi-Learning: Reinforcement Learning with Demonstrations using Successor Features and Inverse Temporal Difference Learning

ICML 2021oral

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with no-reward demonstrations, a setting in which an RL agent has access to additional data from the interaction of other agents with the same environment. However, it has no access to the rewards or goals of these agents, and their objectives and levels of exper…

2020

Emergent Complexity and Zero-shot Transfer via Unsupervised Environment Design

NeurIPS 2020oral

A wide range of reinforcement learning (RL) problems --- including robustness, transfer learning, unsupervised RL, and emergent complexity --- require specifying a distribution of tasks or environments in which a policy will be trained. However, creating a useful distribution of environments is err…

2019

Approximating Interactive Human Evaluation with Self-Play for Open-Domain Dialog Systems

NeurIPS 2019poster

Building an open-domain conversational agent is a challenging problem. Current evaluation methods, mostly post-hoc judgments of static conversation, do not capture conversation quality in a realistic interactive context. In this paper, we investigate interactive human evaluation and provide evidence…

2019

Social Influence as Intrinsic Motivation for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2019oral

We propose a unified mechanism for achieving coordination and communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), through rewarding agents for having causal influence over other agents’ actions. Causal influence is assessed using counterfactual reasoning. At each timestep, an agent simulates…

2017

Sequence Tutor: Conservative Fine-Tuning of Sequence Generation Models with KL-control

ICML 2017poster

This paper proposes a general method for improving the structure and quality of sequences generated by a recurrent neural network (RNN), while maintaining information originally learned from data, as well as sample diversity. An RNN is first pre-trained on data using maximum likelihood estimation (M…

Cited by 213SourcePDFScholar
2017

Tuning Recurrent Neural Networks with Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2017workshop

The approach of training sequence models using supervised learning and next-step prediction suffers from known failure modes. For example, it is notoriously difficult to ensure multi-step generated sequences have coherent global structure. We propose a novel sequence-learning approach in which we u…

Cited by 90SourceScholar