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Russ Salakhutdinov

21 accepted papers

2026

From Reasoning Traces to Reusable Modules: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Generalization in Language Model Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key mechanism for transforming LLMs into robust reasoners. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often limits models to the distribution of observed reasoning traces, RL post-training significantly improves performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks that…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

IsoCompute Playbook: Optimally Scaling Sampling Compute for LLM RL

ICML 2026poster

While scaling laws guide compute allocation for LLM pre-training, analogous prescriptions for reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of LLMs remain poorly understood. We study the compute-optimal allocation of sampling compute for on-policy RL methods in LLMs, framing scaling as a compute-constra…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Maximum Likelihood Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026oral

Maximum likelihood is fundamental to supervised learning but it cannot be directly applied in correctness-based problems with non-differentiable sampling. In these settings, reinforcement learning (RL) is typically used to maximize expected reward. We show that for binary correctness tasks, expected…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Rethinking Thinking Tokens: LLMs as Improvement Operators

ICML 2026poster

Reasoning training incentivizes LLMs to produce long chains of thought (long CoT), which among other things, allows them to explore solution strategies with self-checking. This results in higher accuracy, but inflates context length, token/compute cost, and answer latency. We ask: Can current models…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Dissecting Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LM Agents

ICLR 2025poster

As language models (LMs) are used to build autonomous agents in real environments, ensuring their adversarial robustness becomes a critical challenge. Unlike chatbots, agents are compound systems with multiple components taking actions, which existing LMs safety evaluations do not adequately address…

2025

FACTR: Force-Attending Curriculum Training for Contact-Rich Policy Learning

RSS 2025poster

Many contact-rich tasks humans perform, such as box pickup or hammering, rely on force feedback for reliable execution. However, this force information, which is readily available in most robot arms, is not commonly used in teleoperation and policy learning. Consequently, robot behavior is often lim…

Cited by 1PDFScholar
2025

Self-Correcting Decoding with Generative Feedback for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance in multi-modal tasks, they are prone to generating hallucinatory text responses that do not align with the given visual input, which restricts their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. In this work, insp…

2025

Training a Generally Curious Agent

ICML 2025oral

Efficient exploration is essential for intelligent systems interacting with their environment, but existing language models often fall short in scenarios that require strategic information gathering. In this paper, we present **Paprika**, a fine-tuning approach that enables language models to develo…

2024

HEMM: Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Foundation Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Multimodal foundation models that can holistically process text alongside images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities are increasingly used in a variety of real-world applications. However, it is challenging to characterize and study progress in multimodal foundation models, given the range o…

2024

Inference via Interpolation: Contrastive Representations Provably Enable Planning and Inference

NeurIPS 2024poster

Given time series data, how can we answer questions like ``what will happen in the future?'' and ``how did we get here?'' These sorts of probabilistic inference questions are challenging when observations are high-dimensional. In this paper, we show how these questions can have compact, closed form…

2024

MMoE: Enhancing Multimodal Models with Mixtures of Multimodal Interaction Experts

EMNLP 2024main

Advances in multimodal models have greatly improved how interactions relevant to various tasks are modeled. Today’s multimodal models mainly focus on the correspondence between images and text, using this for tasks like image-text matching. However, this covers only a subset of real-world interactio…

2024

Multimodal Learning Without Labeled Multimodal Data: Guarantees and Applications

ICLR 2024poster

In many machine learning systems that jointly learn from multiple modalities, a core research question is to understand the nature of multimodal interactions: how modalities combine to provide new task-relevant information that was not present in either alone. We study this challenge of interaction…

2024

Stylus: Automatic Adapter Selection for Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024oral

Beyond scaling base models with more data or parameters, fine-tuned adapters provide an alternative way to generate high fidelity, custom images at reduced costs. As such, adapters have been widely adopted by open-source communities, accumulating a database of over 100K adapters—most of which are hi…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic Visual Web Tasks

ACL 2024long

Autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and executing actions on the web offer a promising avenue for automating computer tasks. However, the majority of existing benchmarks primarily focus on text-based agents, neglecting many natural tasks that require visual information to effectively s…

2023

Factorized Contrastive Learning: Going Beyond Multi-view Redundancy

NeurIPS 2023poster

In a wide range of multimodal tasks, contrastive learning has become a particularly appealing approach since it can successfully learn representations from abundant unlabeled data with only pairing information (e.g., image-caption or video-audio pairs). Underpinning these approaches is the assumptio…

2023

Graph Generative Model for Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks

ICML 2023poster

As the field of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) continues to grow, it experiences a corresponding increase in the need for large, real-world datasets to train and test new GNN models on challenging, realistic problems. Unfortunately, such graph datasets are often generated from online, highly privacy-re…

2023

Simplifying Model-based RL: Learning Representations, Latent-space Models, and Policies with One Objective

ICLR 2023poster

While reinforcement learning (RL) methods that learn an internal model of the environment have the potential to be more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts, learning to model raw observations from high dimensional sensors can be challenging. Prior work has addressed this challenge by…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2022

Zero-shot Transfer Learning within a Heterogeneous Graph via Knowledge Transfer Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Data continuously emitted from industrial ecosystems such as social or e-commerce platforms are commonly represented as heterogeneous graphs (HG) composed of multiple node/edge types. State-of-the-art graph learning methods for HGs known as heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) are applied to…

2021

Efficient Transformers in Reinforcement Learning using Actor-Learner Distillation

ICLR 2021poster

Many real-world applications such as robotics provide hard constraints on power and compute that limit the viable model complexity of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Similarly, in many distributed RL settings, acting is done on un-accelerated hardware such as CPUs, which likewise restricts model…

Cited by 52SourcePDFScholar
2021

MultiBench: Multiscale Benchmarks for Multimodal Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Learning multimodal representations involves integrating information from multiple heterogeneous sources of data. It is a challenging yet crucial area with numerous real-world applications in multimedia, affective computing, robotics, finance, human-computer interaction, and healthcare. Unfortunatel…

Cited by 186SourceScholar