6 papers
Human Adults and LLMs as Scientists: Who Benefits from Active Exploration?
Mandana Samiei, Eunice Yiu, Anthony GX-Chen +5
A long-standing finding in the causal learning literature is that adults struggle to identify conjunctive causal rules, where an effect requires the simultaneous presence of multip…
Using Reward Uncertainty to Induce Diverse Behaviour in Reinforcement Learning
Anthony GX-Chen, Ankit Anand, Gheorghe Comanici +7
Classical reinforcement learning (RL) typically seeks a deterministic policy that maximizes the expected sum of a scalar reward. Yet, modern applications such as language model fin…
Failing to Falsify: Evaluating and Mitigating Confirmation Bias in Language Models
Ayush Rajesh Jhaveri, Anthony GX-Chen, Ilia Sucholutsky +1
Confirmation bias, the tendency to seek evidence that supports rather than challenges one's belief, hinders one's reasoning ability. We examine whether large language models (LLMs)…
KL-Regularized Reinforcement Learning is Designed to Mode Collapse
Anthony GX-Chen, Jatin Prakash, Jeff Guo +2
It is commonly believed that optimizing the reverse KL divergence results in "mode seeking", while optimizing forward KL results in "mass covering", with the latter being preferred…
Language Agents Mirror Human Causal Reasoning Biases. How Can We Help Them Think Like Scientists?
Anthony GX-Chen, Dongyan Lin, Mandana Samiei +4
Language model (LM) agents are increasingly used as autonomous decision-makers which need to actively gather information to guide their decisions. A crucial cognitive skill for suc…
Efficient Exploration and Discriminative World Model Learning with an Object-Centric Abstraction
Anthony GX-Chen, Kenneth Marino, Rob Fergus
In the face of difficult exploration problems in reinforcement learning, we study whether giving an agent an object-centric mapping (describing a set of items and their attributes)…