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Ryan Liu

10 accepted papers

2026

Evaluating Language Models' Evaluations of Games

ICLR 2026poster

Reasoning is not just about solving problems---it is also about evaluating which problems are worth solving at all. Evaluations of artificial intelligence (AI) systems primarily focused on problem solving, historically by studying how models play games such as chess and Go. In this paper, we advocat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

From Evaluation to Design: Using Potential Energy Surface Smoothness Metrics to Guide ML Interatomic Potential Architectures

ICML 2026poster

Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials (MLIPs) sometimes fail to reproduce the physical smoothness of the quantum potential energy surface (PES), leading to erroneous behavior in downstream simulations that can be missed by standard energy and force regression evaluations. Existing evaluations, suc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Large Language Models Develop Novel Social Biases Through Adaptive Exploration

ICML 2026oral

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted into frameworks that grant them the capacity to make real decisions, it is increasingly important to ensure that they are unbiased. In this paper, we argue that the predominant approach of simply removing existing biases from models is not enough. Using a …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Are Large Language Models Sensitive to the Motives Behind Communication?

NeurIPS 2025poster

Human communication is $\textit{motivated}$: people speak, write, and create content with a particular communicative intent in mind. As a result, information that large language models (LLMs) and AI agents process is inherently framed by humans' intentions and incentives. People are adept at navigat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Large Language Models Assume People are More Rational than We Really are

ICLR 2025poster

In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) must account for this. Previous empirical evidence…

2025

Mind Your Step (by Step): Chain-of-Thought can Reduce Performance on Tasks where Thinking Makes Humans Worse

ICML 2025poster

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become a widely used strategy for improving large language and multimodal model performance. However, it is still an open question under which settings CoT systematically reduces performance. In this paper, we seek to identify the characteristics of tasks where…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2025

Position: LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method

ICML 2025poster

Accurate and verifiable large language model (LLM) simulations of human research subjects promise an accessible data source for understanding human behavior and training new AI systems. However, results to date have been limited, and few social scientists have adopted this method. In this position p…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

How do Large Language Models Navigate Conflicts between Honesty and Helpfulness?

ICML 2024oral

In day-to-day communication, people often approximate the truth --- for example, rounding the time or omitting details --- in order to be maximally helpful to the listener. How do large language models (LLMs) handle such nuanced trade-offs? To address this question, we use psychological models and e…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

API-Assisted Code Generation for Question Answering on Varied Table Structures

EMNLP 2023long main

A persistent challenge to table question answering (TableQA) by generating executable programs has been adapting to varied table structures, typically requiring domain-specific logical forms. In response, this paper introduces a unified TableQA framework that: (1) provides a unified representation f…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Mitigating Manipulation in Peer Review via Randomized Reviewer Assignments

NeurIPS 2020poster

We consider three important challenges in conference peer review: (i) reviewers maliciously attempting to get assigned to certain papers to provide positive reviews, possibly as part of quid-pro-quo arrangements with the authors; (ii) "torpedo reviewing," where reviewers deliberately attempt to get…