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W. Bradley Knox

7 accepted papers

2026

MobileSafetyBench: Evaluating Safety of Autonomous Agents in Mobile Device Control

AAAI 2026technical

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show promising potential in assistive tasks across various domains, including mobile device control. As these agents interact directly with personal information and device settings, ensuring their safe and reliable behavior is crucial to prev

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Modeling Future Conversation Turns to Teach LLMs to Ask Clarifying Questions

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) must often respond to highly ambiguous user requests. In such cases, the LLM's best response may be to ask a clarifying question to elicit more information. Existing LLMs often respond by presupposing a single interpretation of such ambiguous requests, frustrating users…

2024

Contrastive Preference Learning: Learning from Human Feedback without Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second, align the model by optimizing the learned reward via reinfor…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning Optimal Advantage from Preferences and Mistaking It for Reward

AAAI 2024technical

We consider algorithms for learning reward functions from human preferences over pairs of trajectory segments, as used in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Most recent work assumes that human preferences are generated based only upon the reward accrued within those segments, or thei…

2024

Reward (Mis)design for Autonomous Driving (Abstract Reprint)

AAAI 2024technical

This article considers the problem of diagnosing certain common errors in reward design. Its insights are also applicable to the design of cost functions and performance metrics more generally. To diagnose common errors, we develop 8 simple sanity checks for identifying flaws in reward functions. We…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization in Direct Alignment Algorithms

NeurIPS 2024poster

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)has been crucial to the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), however it is often a complex and brittle process. In the classical RLHF framework, a reward model is first trained to represent human preferences, which is in turn used by an onl…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2023

The Perils of Trial-and-Error Reward Design: Misdesign through Overfitting and Invalid Task Specifications

AAAI 2023technical

In reinforcement learning (RL), a reward function that aligns exactly with a task's true performance metric is often necessarily sparse. For example, a true task metric might encode a reward of 1 upon success and 0 otherwise. The sparsity of these true task metrics can make them hard to learn from,…