activity
20212026
most citedAre Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?

133 citations · 281 across the 44 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

46 papers

cs.LG2026

How Strong Is the Evidence for the Artificial Hivemind? Reevaluating Evidence for the Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models

Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, Joshua Kazdan +2

Recent research argues that language models exhibit pronounced homogeneity in open-ended generation, framing such behavior as an Artificial Hivemind that poses a long-term threat t…

cs.SE2026

A Few Pages of Markdown: Committed AI Configuration and Lower Quality Cost after Coding-Agent Adoption

Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Shyam Agarwal, Pavel Azaletskiy +5

Coding agents increase development velocity but also technical debt. Prior work reports only average effects across adopters, hiding wide differences between teams. We introduce RA…

cs.LG2026

Internal Data Repetition Destroys Language Models

Jessica Chudnovsky, Joshua Kazdan, Noam Levi +6

Language models are running out of high-quality training data, and even aggressively deduplicated corpora retain some amount of repetition. Earlier controlled studies predated Chin…

cs.LG2026

Item Response Scaling Laws: A Measurement Theory Approach for Efficient and Generalizable Neural Scaling Estimation

Sang Truong, Yuheng Tu, Rylan Schaeffer +1

Scaling laws provide a fundamental framework for understanding the performance of Language Models (LMs), yet deriving them requires prohibitively expensive evaluations across thous…

cs.LG2026

Consensus is Not Verification: Why Crowd Wisdom Strategies Fail for LLM Truthfulness

Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Joshua Kazdan, Jessica Chudnovsky +4

Pass@k and other methods of scaling inference compute can improve language model performance in domains with external verifiers, including mathematics and code, where incorrect can…

cs.LG2026

Scale Dependent Data Duplication

Joshua Kazdan, Noam Levi, Rylan Schaeffer +6

Data duplication during pretraining can degrade generalization and lead to memorization, motivating aggressive deduplication pipelines. However, at web scale, it is unclear what co…

cs.LG2026

Quantifying the Effect of Test Set Contamination on Generative Evaluations

Rylan Schaeffer, Joshua Kazdan, Baber Abbasi +8

As frontier AI systems are pretrained on web-scale data, test set contamination has become a critical concern for accurately assessing their capabilities. While research has thorou…

cs.AI2025

Efficient Prediction of Pass@k Scaling in Large Language Models

Joshua Kazdan, Rylan Schaeffer, Youssef Allouah +4

Assessing the capabilities and risks of frontier AI systems is a critical area of research, and recent work has shown that repeated sampling from models can dramatically increase b…

cs.LG2025

Understanding Adversarial Transfer: Why Representation-Space Attacks Fail Where Data-Space Attacks Succeed

Isha Gupta, Rylan Schaeffer, Joshua Kazdan +2

The field of adversarial robustness has long established that adversarial examples can successfully transfer between image classifiers and that text jailbreaks can successfully tra…

cs.AI2025

Chain-of-Thought Hijacking

Jianli Zhao, Tingchen Fu, Rylan Schaeffer +2

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve task performance through extended inference-time reasoning. Although previous studies suggest that longer reasoning should lead to more robust…

cs.LG2025

Evaluating the Robustness of Chinchilla Compute-Optimal Scaling

Rylan Schaeffer, Noam Levi, Andreas Kirsch +4

Hoffman et al (2022)'s Chinchilla paper introduced the principle of compute-optimal scaling, laying a foundation for future scaling of language models. In the years since, however,…

cs.LG2025

Pretraining Scaling Laws for Generative Evaluations of Language Models

Rylan Schaeffer, Noam Levi, Brando Miranda +1

Neural scaling laws have driven the field's ever-expanding exponential growth in parameters, data and compute. While scaling behaviors for pretraining losses and discriminative ben…

cs.LG2025

Position: Machine Learning Conferences Should Establish a "Refutations and Critiques" Track

Rylan Schaeffer, Joshua Kazdan, Yegor Denisov-Blanch +11

Science progresses by iteratively advancing and correcting humanity's understanding of the world. In machine learning (ML) research, rapid advancements have led to an explosion of…

cs.CL2025

Min-p, Max Exaggeration: A Critical Analysis of Min-p Sampling in Language Models

Rylan Schaeffer, Joshua Kazdan, Yegor Denisov-Blanch

Sampling from language models impacts the quality and diversity of outputs, affecting both research and real-world applications. Recently, Nguyen et al. 2024's "Turning Up the Heat…

cs.LG2025★ 1 cited

Position: Model Collapse Does Not Mean What You Think

Rylan Schaeffer, Joshua Kazdan, Alvan Caleb Arulandu +1

The proliferation of AI-generated content online has fueled concerns over \emph{model collapse}, a degradation in future generative models' performance when trained on synthetic da…

cs.CL2025

Correlating and Predicting Human Evaluations of Language Models from Natural Language Processing Benchmarks

Rylan Schaeffer, Punit Singh Koura, Binh Tang +11

The explosion of high-performing conversational language models (LMs) has spurred a shift from classic natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks to expensive, time-consuming and…

cs.AI2025

How Do Large Language Monkeys Get Their Power (Laws)?

Rylan Schaeffer, Joshua Kazdan, John Hughes +7

Recent research across mathematical problem solving, proof assistant programming and multimodal jailbreaking documents a striking finding: when (multimodal) language model tackle a…

cs.CR2025

No, of Course I Can! Deeper Fine-Tuning Attacks That Bypass Token-Level Safety Mechanisms

Joshua Kazdan, Abhay Puri, Rylan Schaeffer +5

Leading language model (LM) providers like OpenAI and Anthropic allow customers to fine-tune frontier LMs for specific use cases. To prevent abuse, these providers apply filters to…

cs.CL2024

Best-of-N Jailbreaking

John Hughes, Sara Price, Aengus Lynch +7

We introduce Best-of-N (BoN) Jailbreaking, a simple black-box algorithm that jailbreaks frontier AI systems across modalities. BoN Jailbreaking works by repeatedly sampling variati…

cs.LG2024

Jailbreak Defense in a Narrow Domain: Limitations of Existing Methods and a New Transcript-Classifier Approach

Tony T. Wang, John Hughes, Henry Sleight +7

Defending large language models against jailbreaks so that they never engage in a broadly-defined set of forbidden behaviors is an open problem. In this paper, we investigate the d…

cs.LG2024

ZIP-FIT: Embedding-Free Data Selection via Compression-Based Alignment

Elyas Obbad, Iddah Mlauzi, Brando Miranda +4

Data selection is crucial for optimizing language model (LM) performance on specific tasks, yet most existing methods fail to effectively consider the target task distribution. Cur…

cs.LG2024★ 3 cited

Collapse or Thrive? Perils and Promises of Synthetic Data in a Self-Generating World

Joshua Kazdan, Rylan Schaeffer, Apratim Dey +4

What happens when generative machine learning models are pretrained on web-scale datasets containing data generated by earlier models? Some prior work warns of "model collapse" as…

cs.CV2024

Uncovering Latent Memories: Assessing Data Leakage and Memorization Patterns in Frontier AI Models

Sunny Duan, Mikail Khona, Abhiram Iyer +2

Frontier AI systems are making transformative impacts across society, but such benefits are not without costs: models trained on web-scale datasets containing personal and private…

cs.CL2024

Failures to Find Transferable Image Jailbreaks Between Vision-Language Models

Rylan Schaeffer, Dan Valentine, Luke Bailey +12

The integration of new modalities into frontier AI systems offers exciting capabilities, but also increases the possibility such systems can be adversarially manipulated in undesir…