Valentina Pyatkin

On my way to Oxford: Looking forward to speaking at OxML 2025

Opinion Abstracts: SoLaR Workshop @ COLM 2025 Beyond the two main tracks we are inviting short opinion abstracts (500 words maximum) on new perspectives for what socially responsible language modeling research might look like. The SoLaR organizi...

The submission deadline is August 26 2025 (AoE time), and decisions will be sent out on September 2, 2025.

Submit your abstracts here:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

🔈For the SoLaR workshop
@COLM_conf
we are soliciting opinion abstracts to encourage new perspectives and opinions on responsible language modeling, 1-2 of which will be selected to be presented at the workshop.

Please use the google form below to submit your opinion abstract ⬇️

I had a lot of fun contemplating about memorization questions at the @l2m2workshop.bsky.social panel yesterday together with Niloofar Mireshghallah and Reza Shokri, moderated by
@pietrolesci.bsky.social who did a fantastic job!
#ACL2025

I'll be at #ACL2025🇦🇹!!
Would love to chat about all things pragmatics 🧠, redefining "helpfulness"🤔 and enabling better cross-cultural capabilities 🗺️ 🫶

Presenting our work on culturally offensive nonverbal gestures 👇
🕛Wed @ Poster Session 4
📍Hall 4/5, 11:00-12:30

I did! very very good!!

🔥tokenization panel!

why is vancouver sushi so good? 🤤 (vancouver food in general actually)

This week is #ICML in Vancouver, and a number of our researchers are participating. Here's the full list of Ai2's conference engagements—we look forward to connecting with fellow attendees. 👋

ICML chat | Valentina Pyatkin | Cal.com ICML chat

book a slot for a chat on my cal:

cal.com/valentinap/i...

Let me know if you want to meet up! Always happy to chat!

07/17, Poster: Diverging Preferences: When do Annotators Disagree and do Models Know? icml.cc/virtual/2025...

07/16, Poster: SafetyAnalyst: Interpretable, transparent, and steerable safety moderation for AI behavior
icml.cc/virtual/2025...

I'll be at ICML in Vancouver next week! #ICML2025
You can find me at the following:

- giving an invited talk at the "Models of Human Feedback for AI Alignment" workshop

- giving an invited talk at the "AI for Math" workshop

I'll also present these two papers ⤵️

In Geneva🇨🇭to attend the International Open-Source LLM Builders Summit and present OLMo and Tülu!

And I can't forget to thank my amazing co-authors! In particular @saumyamalik.bsky.social and Victoria Graf, with whom I looked through so many constraints 😄
And @natolambert.bsky.social @hanna-nlp.bsky.social @hamishivi.bsky.social @pdasigi.bsky.social @vwxyzjn.bsky.social

We further discuss what happens when you over-optimize on IF-RLVR: the models tend to prioritize the constraint over the actual instruction! And we suggest possible solutions to this problem.

📝 Paper: buff.ly/1qSA9Pq
💻 Code: github.com/allenai/IFBe...

Additionally, we wrote new training constraints and verifier functions and suggest a good recipe for IF-RLVR training for improved generalization.
We find that IF-RLVR generalization works best on base models and when you train on multiple constraints per instruction!

💡Beyond math/code, instruction following with verifiable constraints is suitable to be learned with RLVR.
But the set of constraints and verifier functions is limited and most models overfit on IFEval.
We introduce IFBench to measure model generalization to unseen constraints.

plus, some fun RL experiments

This new benchmark created by @valentinapy.bsky.social should be the new default replacing IFEval. Some of the best frontier models get <50% and it comes with separate training prompts so people don’t effectively train on test.

Wild gap from o3 > Gemini 2.5 pro of like 30 points.

Introducing IFBench, a benchmark to measure how well AI models follow new, challenging, and diverse verifiable instructions. Top models like Gemini 2.5 Pro or Claude 4 Sonnet are only able to score up to 50%, presenting an open frontier for post-training. 🧵

Check out our take on Chain-of-Thought.
I really like this paper as a survey on the current literature on what CoT is, but more importantly on what it's not.
It also serves as a cautionary tale to the (apparently quite common) misuse of CoT as an interpretable method.

🚨Submission deadline extended to June 27th AoE!🚨

Our reviewer interest form is also open!

See below for more details👇

Third Workshop on Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR) 2025 COLM 2025 in-person Workshop, October 10th at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal, Canada

Submit your paper or sign up to review by June 23, 2025

➡️CFP and workshop info: solar-colm.github.io

➡️Reviewer sign up: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Interested in shaping the progress of responsible AI and meeting leading researchers in the field? SoLaR@COLM 2025 is looking for paper submissions and reviewers!

🤖 ML track: algorithms, math, computation
📚 Socio-technical track: policy, ethics, human participant research

Congrats again!!!

I collected some folk knowledge for RL and stuck them in my lecture slides a couple weeks back: web.mit.edu/6.7920/www/l... See Appendix B... sorry, I know, appendix of a lecture slide deck is not the best for discovery. Suggestions very welcome.

i created a gist with some non default llm courses

gist.github.com/yoavg/95bbc5...

Winter 24 CSE 447/517: Natural Language Processing | Notion Lectures: MWF 1:30pm-2:20pm @📍CSE2 G20

Not sure it fulfills your ">66%" requirement regarding non technicalities of transformers, but @yejinchoinka.bsky.social 's class is very LLM focused: safe-fernleaf-26d.notion.site/Winter-24-CS...

I’m thrilled to share RewardBench 2 📊— We created a new multi-domain reward model evaluation that is substantially harder than RewardBench, we trained and released 70 reward models, and we gained insights about reward modeling benchmarks and downstream performance!