collaborators

7 papers

cs.LG2026

Transformer-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Networked Systems with Long-Range Interactions

Vidur Sinha, Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Guannan Qu

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown promise for large-scale network control, yet existing methods face two major limitations. First, they typically rely on an expon…

cs.LG2026

Emergent and Subliminal Misalignment Through the Lens of Data-Mediated Transfer

Baris Askin, Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Anupam Nayak +3

Fine-tuning LLMs on narrow harmful datasets can induce Emergent Misalignment (EM), where models exhibit misaligned behavior far beyond the fine-tuning distribution. We argue that e…

cs.LG2026

BLOCK-EM: Preventing Emergent Misalignment via Latent Blocking

Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Guannan Qu

Emergent misalignment can arise when a language model is fine-tuned on a narrowly scoped supervised objective: the model learns the target behavior, yet also develops undesirable o…

cs.LG2026

Revisiting Policy Gradients for Restricted Policy Classes: Escaping Myopic Local Optima with -step Policy Gradients

Alex DeWeese, Guannan Qu

This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause fo…

cs.LG2026

Towards Effective Theory of LLMs: A Representation Learning Approach

Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Guannan Qu

We propose Representational Effective Theory (RET), a framework for describing large language model computation in terms of learned macrostates rather than microscopic details. RET…

cs.AI2026

Internal Planning in Language Models: Characterizing Horizon and Branch Awareness

Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Baris Askin, Gauri Joshi +2

The extent to which decoder-only language models (LMs) engage in planning, that is, organizing intermediate computations to support coherent long-range generation, remains an impor…