activity
20242026
collaborators

5 papers

cs.CL2026

Position: It's Time to Optimize LLMs for Self-Consistency

Itamar Pres, Belinda Z. Li, Laura Ruis +6

Despite ever-increasing sophistication in language model (LM) pre- and post-training pipelines, many important failures persist: models overcondition on user framing ("sycophancy")…

cs.LG2026

Self-CTRL: Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning

Itamar Pres, Laura Ruis, Melat Ghebreselassie +2

Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users. This paper describes Self-Consistency Training with…

cs.LG2025

Why Can't Transformers Learn Multiplication? Reverse-Engineering Reveals Long-Range Dependency Pitfalls

Xiaoyan Bai, Itamar Pres, Yuntian Deng +5

Language models are increasingly capable, yet still fail at a seemingly simple task of multi-digit multiplication. In this work, we study why, by reverse-engineering a model that s…

cs.LG2025

Competition Dynamics Shape Algorithmic Phases of In-Context Learning

Core Francisco Park, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Itamar Pres +1

In-Context Learning (ICL) has significantly expanded the general-purpose nature of large language models, allowing them to adapt to novel tasks using merely the inputted context. T…

cs.AI2024

Towards Reliable Evaluation of Behavior Steering Interventions in LLMs

Itamar Pres, Laura Ruis, Ekdeep Singh Lubana +1

Representation engineering methods have recently shown promise for enabling efficient steering of model behavior. However, evaluation pipelines for these methods have primarily rel…