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Stewart Slocum

3 accepted papers

2026

Beyond Binary Rewards: Training LMs to Reason About Their Uncertainty

ICLR 2026poster

When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to generate natural language “reasoning chains”, their performance improves on a variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful applications of RL for reasoning use binary reward functions that evalua…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Narrow Finetuning Leaves Clearly Readable Traces in the Activation Differences

ICLR 2026poster

Finetuning on narrow domains has become an essential tool to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks and to create models with known unusual properties that are useful for safety research. Model diffing--the study of differences between base and finetuned models--is a promising approach…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Diverse Preference Learning for Capabilities and Alignment

ICLR 2025poster

As LLMs increasingly impact society, their ability to represent diverse perspectives is critical. However, recent studies reveal that alignment algorithms such as RLHF and DPO significantly reduce the diversity of LLM outputs. Not only do aligned LLMs generate text with repetitive structure and wor…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar