← Search

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…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
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…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
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…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
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…