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Sarath Chandar

38 accepted papers

2026

Squeezing More from the Stream : Learning Representation Online for Streaming Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026poster

In streaming Reinforcement Learning (RL), transitions are observed and discarded immediately after a single update. While this minimizes resource usage for on-device applications, it makes agents notoriously sample-inefficient, since value-based losses alone struggle to extract meaningful representa…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Expressive Limits of Diagonal SSMs for State-Tracking

ICLR 2026poster

State-Space Models (SSMs) have recently been shown to achieve strong empirical performance on a variety of long-range sequence modeling tasks while remaining efficient and highly-parallelizable. However, the theoretical understanding of their expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Markovian Thinker

ICLR 2026poster

Reasoning LLMs suffer from quadratic compute growth as their context length increases, making reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and test-time scaling prohibitively expensive. Prior work has tried to lighten the computational burden by shortening reasoning traces through pruning,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Generalist Hanabi Agent

ICLR 2025poster

Traditional multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems can develop cooperative strategies through repeated interactions. However, these systems are unable to perform well on any other setting than the one they have been trained on, and struggle to successfully cooperate with unfamiliar collab…

2025

BindGPT: A Scalable Framework for 3D Molecular Design via Language Modeling and Reinforcement Learning

AAAI 2025technical

Generating novel active molecules for a given protein is an extremely challenging task for generative models that requires an understanding of the complex physical interactions between the molecule and its environment. This paper presents a novel generative model, BindGPT, which uses a conceptually…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2025

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors Provides Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs

ACL 2025short

There is a growing interest in training domain-expert LLMs that excel in specific technical fields compared to their general-purpose instruction-tuned counterparts. However, these expert models are not either explicitly trained to be safe, or experience a loss in their safety abilities in the proces…

2025

Do Robot Snakes Dream like Electric Sheep? Investigating the Effects of Architectural Inductive Biases on Hallucination

ACL 2025finding

The growth in prominence of large language models (LLMs) in everyday life can be largely attributed to their generative abilities, yet some of this is also owed to the risks and costs associated with their use. On one front is their tendency to hallucinate false or misleading information, limiting t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Small Encoders Can Rival Large Decoders in Detecting Groundedness

ACL 2025finding

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external context significantly improves their performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, LLMs struggle to answer queries reliably when the provided context lacks information, often resorting to ungrounded speculation or internal know…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

TAPNext: Tracking Any Point (TAP) as Next Token Prediction

ICCV 2025poster

Tracking Any Point (TAP) in a video is a challenging computer vision problem with many demonstrated applications in robotics, video editing, and 3D reconstruction. Existing methods for TAP rely heavily on complex tracking-specific inductive biases and heuristics, limiting their generality and potent…

2024

A Deep Dive into the Trade-Offs of Parameter-Efficient Preference Alignment Techniques

ACL 2024long

Large language models are first pre-trained on trillions of tokens and then instruction-tuned or aligned to specific preferences. While pre-training remains out of reach for most researchers due to the compute required, fine-tuning has become affordable thanks to parameter-efficient methods such as…

2024

Are self-explanations from Large Language Models faithful?

ACL 2024findings

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many tasks and will even explain their reasoning, so-called self-explanations. However, convincing and wrong self-explanations can lead to unsupported confidence in LLMs, thus increasing risk. Therefore, it’s important to measure if self-explan…

2024

Balancing Context Length and Mixing Times for Reinforcement Learning at Scale

NeurIPS 2024poster

Due to the recent remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, researchers have begun to consider challenging learning problems such as learning to generalize behavior from large offline datasets or learning online in non-Markovian environments. Meanwhile, recent advances in both of these areas h…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Context-Aware Assistant Selection for Improved Inference Acceleration with Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Despite their widespread adoption, large language models (LLMs) remain prohibitive to use under resource constraints, with their ever growing sizes only increasing the barrier for use. One particular issue stems from the high latency associated with auto-regressive generation in LLMs, rendering the…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Do Large Language Models Know How Much They Know?

EMNLP 2024main

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as highly capable systems and are increasingly being integrated into various uses. Nevertheless, the rapid advancement in their deployment trails a comprehensive understanding of their internal mechanisms, as well as a delineation of their capabilities and l…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Exploring Quantization for Efficient Pre-Training of Transformer Language Models

EMNLP 2024finding

The increasing scale of Transformer models has led to an increase in their pre-training computational requirements. While quantization has proven to be effective after pre-training and during fine-tuning, applying quantization in Transformers during pre-training has remained largely unexplored at sc…

2024

Fairness-Aware Structured Pruning in Transformers

AAAI 2024technical

The increasing size of large language models (LLMs) has introduced challenges in their training and inference. Removing model components is perceived as a solution to tackle the large model sizes, however, existing pruning methods solely focus on performance, without considering an essential aspect…

2024

Intelligent Switching for Reset-Free RL

ICLR 2024poster

In the real world, the strong episode resetting mechanisms that are needed to train agents in simulation are unavailable. The resetting assumption limits the potential of reinforcement learning in the real world, as providing resets to an agent usually requires the creation of additional handcrafted…

2024

Lookbehind-SAM: k steps back, 1 step forward

ICML 2024poster

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) methods have gained increasing popularity by formulating the problem of minimizing both loss value and loss sharpness as a minimax objective. In this work, we increase the efficiency of the maximization and minimization parts of SAM's objective to achieve a better…

2024

Mastering Memory Tasks with World Models

ICLR 2024oral

Current model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents struggle with long-term dependencies. This limits their ability to effectively solve tasks involving extended time gaps between actions and outcomes, or tasks demanding the recalling of distant observations to inform current actions. To improv…

2024

Why Don’t Prompt-Based Fairness Metrics Correlate?

ACL 2024long

The widespread use of large language models has brought up essential questions about the potential biases these models might learn. This led to the development of several metrics aimed at evaluating and mitigating these biases. In this paper, we first demonstrate that prompt-based fairness metrics e…

2023

Conditionally optimistic exploration for cooperative deep multi-agent reinforcement learning

UAI 2023poster

Efficient exploration is critical in cooperative deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). In this work, we propose an exploration method that effectively encourages cooperative exploration based on the idea of sequential action-computation scheme. The high-level intuition is that to perform o…

2023

Deep Learning on a Healthy Data Diet: Finding Important Examples for Fairness

AAAI 2023technical

Data-driven predictive solutions predominant in commercial applications tend to suffer from biases and stereotypes, which raises equity concerns. Prediction models may discover, use, or amplify spurious correlations based on gender or other protected personal characteristics, thus discriminating aga…

2023

EpiK-Eval: Evaluation for Language Models as Epistemic Models

EMNLP 2023long main

In the age of artificial intelligence, the role of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly central. Despite their growing prevalence, their capacity to consolidate knowledge from different training documents—a crucial ability in numerous applications—remains unexplored. This paper pres…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Measuring the Knowledge Acquisition-Utilization Gap in Pretrained Language Models

EMNLP 2023long findings

While pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown evidence of acquiring vast amounts of knowledge, it remains unclear how much of this parametric knowledge is actually usable in performing downstream tasks. We propose a systematic framework to measure parametric knowledge utilization in PLMs. Our…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Self-Influence Guided Data Reweighting for Language Model Pre-training

EMNLP 2023long main

Language Models (LMs) pre-trained with selfsupervision on large text corpora have become the default starting point for developing models for various NLP tasks. Once the pre-training corpus has been assembled, all data samples in the corpus are treated with equal importance during LM pre-training. H…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Detecting Languages Unintelligible to Multilingual Models through Local Structure Probes

EMNLP 2022finding

Providing better language tools for low-resource and endangered languages is imperative for equitable growth.Recent progress with massively multilingual pretrained models has proven surprisingly effective at performing zero-shot transfer to a wide variety of languages.However, this transfer is not u…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

Local Structure Matters Most: Perturbation Study in NLU

ACL 2022findings

Recent research analyzing the sensitivity of natural language understanding models to word-order perturbations has shown that neural models are surprisingly insensitive to the order of words. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon by developing order-altering perturbations on the order of wor…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2022

Memory Augmented Optimizers for Deep Learning

ICLR 2022poster

Popular approaches for minimizing loss in data-driven learning often involve an abstraction or an explicit retention of the history of gradients for efficient parameter updates. The aggregated history of gradients nudges the parameter updates in the right direction even when the gradients at any gi…

2022

PatchUp: A Feature-Space Block-Level Regularization Technique for Convolutional Neural Networks

AAAI 2022technical

Large capacity deep learning models are often prone to a high generalization gap when trained with a limited amount of labeled training data. A recent class of methods to address this problem uses various ways to construct a new training sample by mixing a pair (or more) of training samples. We prop…

2022

Towards Evaluating Adaptivity of Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Methods

ICML 2022spotlight

In recent years, a growing number of deep model-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been introduced. The interest in deep model-based RL is not surprising, given its many potential benefits, such as higher sample efficiency and the potential for fast adaption to changes in the environment…

2021

Continuous Coordination As a Realistic Scenario for Lifelong Learning

ICML 2021spotlight

Current deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are still highly task-specific and lack the ability to generalize to new environments. Lifelong learning (LLL), however, aims at solving multiple tasks sequentially by efficiently transferring and using knowledge between tasks. Despite a surge of i…

2021

Towered Actor Critic For Handling Multiple Action Types In Reinforcement Learning For Drug Discovery

AAAI 2021technical

Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant progress in both abstract and real-world domains, but the majority of state-of-the-art algorithms deal only with monotonic actions. However, some applications require agents to reason over different types of actions. Our application simulates reaction…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2020

Learning to Navigate The Synthetically Accessible Chemical Space Using Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2020poster

Over the last decade, there has been significant progress in the field of machine learning for de novo drug design, particularly in generative modeling of novel chemical structures. However, current generative approaches exhibit a significant challenge: they do not ensure that the proposed molecular…

2020

The LoCA Regret: A Consistent Metric to Evaluate Model-Based Behavior in Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2020poster

Deep model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has the potential to substantially improve the sample-efficiency of deep RL. While various challenges have long held it back, a number of papers have recently come out reporting success with deep model-based methods. This is a great development, but the l…

2017

GuessWhat?! Visual Object Discovery Through Multi-Modal Dialogue

CVPR 2017spotlight

We introduce GuessWhat?!, a two-player guessing game as a testbed for research on the interplay of computer vision and dialogue systems. The goal of the game is to locate an unknown object in a rich image scene by asking a sequence of questions. Higher-level image understanding, like spatial reason…

Cited by 482PDFScholar