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Vincent Herrmann

5 accepted papers

2026

Multiple Token Divergence: Measuring and Steering In-Context Computation Density

ICLR 2026poster

Measuring the in-context computational effort of language models is a key challenge, as metrics like next-token loss fail to capture reasoning complexity. Prior methods based on latent state compressibility can be invasive and unstable. We propose Multiple Token Divergence (MTD), a simple measure of…

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2026

Position: Interestingness is an Inductive Heuristic for Future Compression Progress

ICML 2026poster

This position paper argues that truly open-ended intelligence is bottlenecked by the challenge of *interestingness*: the ability to prospectively identify which tasks or data hold the potential for future progress. We formalize interestingness as an inductive heuristic for future compression progres…

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2025

Measuring In-Context Computation Complexity via Hidden State Prediction

ICML 2025poster

Detecting when a neural sequence model does "interesting" computation is an open problem. The next token prediction loss is a poor indicator: Low loss can stem from trivially predictable sequences that are uninteresting, while high loss may reflect unpredictable but also irrelevant information that…

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2024

Learning Useful Representations of Recurrent Neural Network Weight Matrices

ICML 2024oral

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are general-purpose parallel-sequential computers. The program of an RNN is its weight matrix. How to learn useful representations of RNN weights that facilitate RNN analysis as well as downstream tasks? While the _mechanistic approach_ directly looks at some RNN's w…

2023

Goal-Conditioned Generators of Deep Policies

AAAI 2023technical

Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning optimal policies, given goals encoded in special command inputs. Here we study goal-conditioned neural nets (NNs) that learn to generate deep NN policies in form of context-specific weight matrices, similar to Fast Weight Programmers and…