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Nick Haber

23 accepted papers

2026

One Bias After Another: Mechanistic Reward Shaping and Persistent Biases in Language Reward Models

ICML 2026poster

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By systematically measuring biases in five high-quality RMs, inc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Fantastic Bugs and Where to Find Them in AI Benchmarks

NeurIPS 2025poster

Benchmarks are pivotal in driving AI progress, and invalid benchmark questions frequently undermine their reliability. Manually identifying and correcting errors among thousands of benchmark questions is not only infeasible but also a critical bottleneck for reliable evaluation. In this work, we int…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

From Replication to Redesign: Exploring Pairwise Comparisons for LLM-Based Peer Review

NeurIPS 2025poster

The advent of large language models (LLMs) offers unprecedented opportunities to reimagine peer review beyond the constraints of traditional workflows. Despite these opportunities, prior efforts have largely focused on replicating traditional review workflows with LLMs serving as direct substitutes…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Hypothetical Minds: Scaffolding Theory of Mind for Multi-Agent Tasks with Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods struggle with the non-stationarity of multi-agent systems and fail to adaptively learn online when tested with novel agents. Here, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to create an autonomous agent that can handle these challenges. Our agent, Hyp…

2025

LayoutVLM: Differentiable Optimization of 3D Layout via Vision-Language Models

CVPR 2025poster

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, enabling intuitive understanding and manipulation of objects in three-dimensional space. While foundation models demonstrate remarkable performance on some benchmarks, they still struggle with 3D reasoning tasks like arranging objects in…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2025

ResearchCodeBench: Benchmarking LLMs on Implementing Novel Machine Learning Research Code

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in transforming machine learning research, yet their capability to faithfully implement genuinely novel ideas from recent research papers—ideas unseen during pretraining—remains unclear. We introduce ResearchCodeBench, a benchmark that evaluates LLMs’…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Symmetrical Visual Contrastive Optimization: Aligning Vision-Language Models with Minimal Contrastive Images

ACL 2025long

Recent studies have shown that Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) tend to neglect image content and over-rely on language-model priors, resulting in errors in visually grounded tasks and hallucinations. We hypothesize that this issue arises because existing VLMs are not explicitly trained to genera…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Sound of Syntax: Finetuning and Comprehensive Evaluation of Language Models for Speech Pathology

EMNLP 2025

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, more than 3.4 million children experience speech disorders that require clinical intervention. The number of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) is roughly 20 times fewer than the number of affected children, highlighting a significant gap in chil

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

When Models Know More Than They Can Explain: Quantifying Knowledge Transfer in Human-AI Collaboration

NeurIPS 2025poster

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as close collaborators for humans, it is crucial that they express their reasoning in ways that humans can understand and learn from. However, this capability remains relatively less understood and under-evaluated. To address this, we introduce a co…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

ContextRef: Evaluating Referenceless Metrics for Image Description Generation

ICLR 2024poster

Referenceless metrics (e.g., CLIPScore) use pretrained vision--language models to assess image descriptions directly without costly ground-truth reference texts. Such methods can facilitate rapid progress, but only if they truly align with human preference judgments. In this paper, we introduce Cont…

2024

FactorSim: Generative Simulation via Factorized Representation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Generating simulations to train intelligent agents in game-playing and robotics from natural language input, user input, or task documentation remains an open-ended challenge. Existing approaches focus on parts of this challenge, such as generating reward functions or task hyperparameters. Unlike pr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments

CVPR 2024poster

3D simulated environments play a critical role in Embodied AI but their creation requires expertise and extensive manual effort restricting their diversity and scope. To mitigate this limitation we present Holodeck a system that generates 3D environments to match a user-supplied prompt fully automat…

2024

Hypothesis Search: Inductive Reasoning with Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Inductive reasoning is a core problem-solving capacity: humans can identify underlying principles from a few examples, which can then be robustly generalized to novel scenarios. Recent work has evaluated large language models (LLMs) on inductive reasoning tasks by directly prompting them yielding "i…

2024

Learning Formal Mathematics From Intrinsic Motivation

NeurIPS 2024oral

How did humanity coax mathematics from the aether? We explore the Platonic view that mathematics can be discovered from its axioms---a game of conjecture and proof. We describe an agent that jointly learns to pose challenging problems for itself (conjecturing) and solve them (theorem proving). Given…

2024

Policy-shaped prediction: avoiding distractions in model-based reinforcement learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a promising route to sample-efficient policy optimization. However, a known vulnerability of reconstruction-based MBRL consists of scenarios in which detailed aspects of the world are highly predictable, but irrelevant to learning a good policy. Such scen…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Generating and Evaluating Tests for K-12 Students with Language Model Simulations: A Case Study on Sentence Reading Efficiency

EMNLP 2023long main

Developing an educational test can be expensive and time-consuming, as each item must be written by experts and then evaluated by collecting hundreds of student responses. Moreover, many tests require multiple distinct sets of questions administered throughout the school year to closely monitor stud…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Parsel🐍: Algorithmic Reasoning with Language Models by Composing Decompositions

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Despite recent success in large language model (LLM) reasoning, LLMs struggle with hierarchical multi-step reasoning tasks like generating complex programs. For these tasks, humans often start with a high-level algorithmic design and implement each part gradually. We introduce Parsel, a framework en…

2022

Interaction Modeling with Multiplex Attention

NeurIPS 2022accept

Modeling multi-agent systems requires understanding how agents interact. Such systems are often difficult to model because they can involve a variety of types of interactions that layer together to drive rich social behavioral dynamics. Here we introduce a method for accurately modeling multi-agent…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2021

ThreeDWorld: A Platform for Interactive Multi-Modal Physical Simulation

NeurIPS 2021poster

We introduce ThreeDWorld (TDW), a platform for interactive multi-modal physical simulation. TDW enables the simulation of high-fidelity sensory data and physical interactions between mobile agents and objects in rich 3D environments. Unique properties include real-time near-photo-realistic image ren…

Cited by 342SourcecodeScholar
2020

Active World Model Learning with Progress Curiosity

ICML 2020poster

World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal horizons, and an understanding of…

Cited by 75SourcePDFScholar
2018

Learning to Play With Intrinsically-Motivated, Self-Aware Agents

NeurIPS 2018poster

Infants are experts at playing, with an amazing ability to generate novel structured behaviors in unstructured environments that lack clear extrinsic reward signals. We seek to mathematically formalize these abilities using a neural network that implements curiosity-driven intrinsic motivation. Usi…

Cited by 153SourcePDFScholar