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Silviu Pitis

9 accepted papers

2025

Simulating Viva Voce Examinations to Evaluate Clinical Reasoning in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Clinical reasoning in medicine is a hypothesis-driven process where physicians refine diagnoses from limited information through targeted history, physical examination, and diagnostic investigations. In contrast, current medical benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) primarily assess knowledge…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox

ICLR 2024spotlight

Recent advances in Language Model (LM) agents and tool use, exemplified by applications like ChatGPT Plugins, enable a rich set of capabilities but also amplify potential risks—such as leaking private data or causing financial losses. Identifying these risks is labor-intensive, necessitating impleme…

2024

Improving Context-Aware Preference Modeling for Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

While finetuning language models from pairwise preferences has proven remarkably effective, the underspecified nature of natural language presents critical challenges. Direct preference feedback is uninterpretable, difficult to provide where multidimensional criteria may apply, and often inconsisten…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Consistent Aggregation of Objectives with Diverse Time Preferences Requires Non-Markovian Rewards

NeurIPS 2023poster

As the capabilities of artificial agents improve, they are being increasingly deployed to service multiple diverse objectives and stakeholders. However, the composition of these objectives is often performed ad hoc, with no clear justification. This paper takes a normative approach to multi-objectiv…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

Large Language Models are Human-Level Prompt Engineers

ICLR 2023poster

By conditioning on natural language instructions, large language models (LLMs) have displayed impressive capabilities as general-purpose computers. However, task performance depends significantly on the quality of the prompt used to steer the model, and most effective prompts have been handcrafted b…

2022

MoCoDA: Model-based Counterfactual Data Augmentation

NeurIPS 2022accept

The number of states in a dynamic process is exponential in the number of objects, making reinforcement learning (RL) difficult in complex, multi-object domains. For agents to scale to the real world, they will need to react to and reason about unseen combinations of objects. We argue that the abil…

2020

An Inductive Bias for Distances: Neural Nets that Respect the Triangle Inequality

ICLR 2020poster

Distances are pervasive in machine learning. They serve as similarity measures, loss functions, and learning targets; it is said that a good distance measure solves a task. When defining distances, the triangle inequality has proven to be a useful constraint, both theoretically---to prove convergenc…

Cited by 28SourcecodeScholar
2020

Counterfactual Data Augmentation using Locally Factored Dynamics

NeurIPS 2020poster

Many dynamic processes, including common scenarios in robotic control and reinforcement learning (RL), involve a set of interacting subprocesses. Though the subprocesses are not independent, their interactions are often sparse, and the dynamics at any given time step can often be decomposed into loc…

2020

Maximum Entropy Gain Exploration for Long Horizon Multi-goal Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2020poster

What goals should a multi-goal reinforcement learning agent pursue during training in long-horizon tasks? When the desired (test time) goal distribution is too distant to offer a useful learning signal, we argue that the agent should not pursue unobtainable goals. Instead, it should set its own intr…