Joschka Strüber @ICML2025 🇨🇦

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨
We’ve just launched openretina, an open-source framework for collaborative retina modeling across datasets and species.
A 🧵👇 (1/9)

AI can generate correct-seeming hypotheses (and papers!). Brandolini's law states BS is harder to refute than generate. Can LMs falsify incorrect solutions? o3-mini (high) scores just 9% on our new benchmark REFUTE. Verification is not necessarily easier than generation 🧵

New preprint out! 🎉

How does LLM training loss translate to downstream performance?

We show that pretraining data and tokenizer shape loss-to-loss scaling, while architecture and other factors play a surprisingly minor role!
brendel-group.github.io/llm-line/ 🧵1/8

CuratedThoughts: Data Curation for RL Datasets 🚀

Since DeepSeek-R1 introduced reasoning-based RL, datasets like Open-R1 & OpenThoughts emerged for fine-tuning & GRPO. Our deep dive found major flaws — 25% of OpenThoughts needed elimination by data curation.

Here's why 👇🧵

Hiring announcement: ELLIS Institute Tübingen is looking for ML Researchers & Engineers for Open-Source AI Tutoring (m/f/d). The image features a white background with bold black text and the colorful ELLIS logo at the bottom.

🚀 We’re hiring! Join Bernhard Schölkopf & me at @ellisinsttue.bsky.social to push the frontier of #AI in education!

We’re building cutting-edge, open-source AI tutoring models for high-quality, adaptive learning for all pupils with support from the Hector Foundation.

👉 forms.gle/sxvXbJhZSccr...

Hi Sebastian, can you please add me to the starter pack? Thank you and have a great weekend!

Paper📜: arxiv.org/abs/2502.04313
Webpage🌐: model-similarity.github.io
Code🧑‍💻: github.com/model-simila...
Data📂: huggingface.co/datasets/bet...
Joint work with Shashwat Goel, Ilze Auzina, Karuna Chandra, @bayesiankitten.bsky.social @pkprofgiri.bsky.social, Douwe Kiela,
MatthiasBethge and Jonas Geiping

Sounds interesting? Play with model similarity metrics on our @huggingface
space huggingface.co/spaces/bethg..., thanks to sample-level predictions on OpenLLMLeaderboard. Or run pip install lm-sim, we welcome open-source contributions!

Similarity offers a different (ha!) perspective to compare LMs, that we think should be more popular. Can we measure free-text reasoning similarity? How correlated are our research bets? Implications for multi-agent systems? These are just some questions we need more research on!

We will defer more to AI oversight for both evaluation and training as capabilities increase. Concerningly, more capable models are making more similar mistakes📈🙀
Appendix: Slightly steeper slope for instruct models, and switching architecture to Mamba doesnt reduce similarity!

For Training on AI Annotations: We find complementary knowledge (lower similarity) predicts weak-to-strong generalization, i.e. gains from training on a smaller expert model's annotations. The performance ceiling is beyond what was previously understood from elicitation.☯️

For AI Evaluators: We find LM judges favor more similar models, generalizing recent self-preference results. We used partial correlation and multiple regression tests to control for capability. Bias is worse for smaller judges, but effects persist in the largest/best ones too!🤥

First, how to measure model similarity?
💡Similar models make similar mistakes.
❗Two 90% accuracy models have lesser scope to disagree than two 50% models. We adjust for chance agreement due to accuracy.
Taking this into account, we propose a new metric, Chance Adjusted Probabilistic Agreement (CAPA)

🚨Great Models Think Alike and this Undermines AI Oversight🚨
New paper quantifies LM similarity
(1) LLM-as-a-judge favor more similar models🤥
(2) Complementary knowledge benefits Weak-to-Strong Generalization☯️
(3) More capable models have more correlated failures 📈🙀
🧵👇