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Denis Therien

denis.therien@mila.quebec
Independent visiting researcher - McGill University
Supervisor
Hugo Larochelle

Publications

Societal Frameworks Can Improve LLM Alignment
Karolina Stanczak
Nicholas Meade
Mehar Bhatia
Hattie Zhou
Konstantin Böttinger
Jeremy Barnes
Jason Stanley
Nicolas Papernot
Nicolas Chapados
Denis Therien
Timothy Lillicrap
Ana Marasovic
Sylvie Delacroix
Gillian K. Hadfield
Siva Reddy
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on producing responses that meet human expectations and align with shared values… (see more) — a process coined alignment. However, aligning LLMs remains challenging due to the inherent disconnect between the complexity of human values and the narrow nature of the technological approaches designed to address them. Current alignment methods often lead to misspecified objectives, reflecting the broader issue of incomplete contracts, the impracticality of specifying a contract between a model developer and the model that accounts for every scenario in LLM alignment. In this paper, we argue that improving LLM alignment requires incorporating insights from societal alignment frameworks, including social, economic, and contractual alignment, and discuss potential solutions drawn from these domains. Given the role of uncertainty within societal alignment frameworks, we then investigate how it manifests in LLM alignment. It is this pervasive uncertainty that necessitates our alternative view on LLM alignment, framing the under-specified nature of its objectives as an opportunity rather than perfect their specification. Beyond technical improvements in LLM alignment, we discuss the need for participatory alignment interface designs.
2026-06-24
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (published)
doi.org
Societal Alignment Frameworks Can Improve LLM Alignment
Karolina Stanczak
Nicholas Meade
Mehar Bhatia
Hattie Zhou
Konstantin Böttinger
Jeremy Barnes
Jason Stanley
Jessica Montgomery
Richard Zemel
Nicolas Papernot
Nicolas Chapados
Denis Therien
Timothy P Lillicrap
Ana Marasovic
Sylvie Delacroix
Gillian K. Hadfield
Siva Reddy
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on producing responses that meet human expectations and align with shared values… (see more) - a process coined alignment. However, aligning LLMs remains challenging due to the inherent disconnect between the complexity of human values and the narrow nature of the technological approaches designed to address them. Current alignment methods often lead to misspecified objectives, reflecting the broader issue of incomplete contracts, the impracticality of specifying a contract between a model developer, and the model that accounts for every scenario in LLM alignment. In this paper, we argue that improving LLM alignment requires incorporating insights from societal alignment frameworks, including social, economic, and contractual alignment, and discuss potential solutions drawn from these domains. Given the role of uncertainty within societal alignment frameworks, we then investigate how it manifests in LLM alignment. We end our discussion by offering an alternative view on LLM alignment, framing the underspecified nature of its objectives as an opportunity rather than perfect their specification. Beyond technical improvements in LLM alignment, we discuss the need for participatory alignment interface designs.
2025-03-04
Bi-Align @ International Conference on Learning Representations (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
From Machine Learning to Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities for Embodied Intelligence
Nicholas Roy
Ingmar Posner
T. Barfoot
Philippe Beaudoin
Yoshua Bengio
Jeannette Bohg
Oliver Brock
Isabelle Depatie
Dieter Fox
D. Koditschek
Tom'as Lozano-p'erez
Vikash K. Mansinghka
Christopher Pal
Blake Aaron Richards
Dorsa Sadigh
Stefan Schaal
G. Sukhatme
Denis Therien
Marc Emile Toussaint
Michiel van de Panne
2021-10-27
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
A deep learning framework for neuroscience
Blake Aaron Richards
Timothy P Lillicrap
Philippe Beaudoin
Yoshua Bengio
Rafal Bogacz
Amelia Christensen
Claudia Clopath
Rui Ponte Costa
Archy de Berker
Surya Ganguli
Colleen J Gillon
Danijar Hafner
Adam Kepecs
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
Peter Latham
Grace W. Lindsay
Kenneth D. Miller
Richard Naud
Christopher C. Pack
Panayiota Poirazi … (see 12 more)
Pieter Roelfsema
João Sacramento
Andrew Saxe
Benjamin Scellier
Anna C. Schapiro
Walter Senn
Greg Wayne
Daniel Yamins
Friedemann Zenke
Joel Zylberberg
Denis Therien
Konrad Paul Kording
2019-10-27
Nature Neuroscience (published)
doi.org