Publications

Learning to Defer for Causal Discovery with Imperfect Experts
Oscar Clivio
Divyat Mahajan
Perouz Taslakian
Sara Magliacane
Ioannis Mitliagkas
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Drouin
Integrating expert knowledge, e.g. from large language models, into causal discovery algorithms can be challenging when the knowledge is not… (see more) guaranteed to be correct. Expert recommendations may contradict data-driven results, and their reliability can vary significantly depending on the domain or specific query. Existing methods based on soft constraints or inconsistencies in predicted causal relationships fail to account for these variations in expertise. To remedy this, we propose L2D-CD, a method for gauging the correctness of expert recommendations and optimally combining them with data-driven causal discovery results. By adapting learning-to-defer (L2D) algorithms for pairwise causal discovery (CD), we learn a deferral function that selects whether to rely on classical causal discovery methods using numerical data or expert recommendations based on textual meta-data. We evaluate L2D-CD on the canonical Tübingen pairs dataset and demonstrate its superior performance compared to both the causal discovery method and the expert used in isolation. Moreover, our approach identifies domains where the expert's performance is strong or weak. Finally, we outline a strategy for generalizing this approach to causal discovery on graphs with more than two variables, paving the way for further research in this area.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/LLM_Reason_and_Plan (published)
doi.org
openreview.net
Mol-MoE: Training Preference-Guided Routers for Molecule Generation
Diego Calanzone
Pierluca D'Oro
Pierre-Luc Bacon
Recent advances in language models have enabled framing molecule generation as sequence modeling. However, existing approaches often rely on… (see more) single-objective reinforcement learning, limiting their applicability to real-world drug design, where multiple competing properties must be optimized. Traditional multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) methods require costly retraining for each new objective combination, making rapid exploration of trade-offs impractical. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Mol-MoE, a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture that enables efficient test-time steering of molecule generation without retraining. Central to our approach is a preference-based router training objective that incentivizes the router to combine experts in a way that aligns with user-specified trade-offs. This provides improved flexibility in exploring the chemical property space at test time, facilitating rapid trade-off exploration. Benchmarking against state-of-the-art methods, we show that Mol-MoE achieves superior sample quality and steerability.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/GEM (published)
doi.org
openreview.net
PREFERENCE OPTIMIZATION FOR CONCEPT BOTTLENECK MODELS
Emiliano Penaloza
Tianyue H. Zhang
Laurent Charlin
Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) propose to enhance the trustworthiness of AI systems by constraining their decisions on a set of human-unde… (see more)rstandable concepts. However, CBMs typically assume that datasets contain accurate concept labels—an assumption often violated in practice, which we show can significantly degrade performance (by 25% in some cases). To address this, we introduce the Concept Preference Optimization (CPO) objective, a new loss function based on Direct Preference Optimization, which effectively mitigates the negative impact of concept mislabeling on CBM performance. We provide an analysis of some key properties of the CPO objective showing it directly optimizes for the concept’s posterior distribution, and contrast it against Binary Cross Entropy (BCE) where we show CPO is inherently less sensitive to concept noise. We empirically confirm our analysis finding that CPO consistently outperforms BCE in three real-world datasets with and without added label noise.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/Bi-Align (oral)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Refining Answer Distributions for Improved Large Language Model Reasoning
Soumyasundar Pal
Didier Chételat
Yingxue Zhang
Mark J. Coates
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an impressive capability to perform reasoning tasks, especially if they are encouraged to genera… (see more)te a sequence of intermediate steps. Reasoning performance can be improved by suitably combining multiple LLM responses, generated either in parallel in a single query, or via sequential interactions with LLMs throughout the reasoning process. Existing strategies for combination, such as self-consistency and progressive-hint-prompting, make inefficient usage of the LLM responses. We present Refined Answer Distributions, a novel and principled algorithmic framework to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Our approach can be viewed as an iterative sampling strategy for forming a Monte Carlo approximation of an underlying distribution of answers, with the goal of identifying the mode --- the most likely answer. Empirical evaluation on several reasoning benchmarks demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/LLM_Reason_and_Plan (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Rethinking Anti-Misinformation AI
Vidya Sujaya
Kellin Pelrine
Andreea Musulan
Reihaneh Rabbany
This paper takes a position on how anti-misinformation AI works should be developed for the online misinformation context. We observe that t… (see more)he current literature is dominated by works that produce more information for users to process and that this function faces various challenges in bringing meaningful effects to reality. We use anti-misinformation insights from other domains to suggest a redirection of the existing line of work and identify an under-explored opportunity AI can facilitate exploring.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/HAIC (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Rethinking Hallucinations: Correctness, Consistency, and Prompt Multiplicity
Prakhar Ganesh
Reza Shokri
Golnoosh Farnadi
Large language models (LLMs) are known to "hallucinate" by generating false or misleading outputs. Hallucinations pose various harms, from e… (see more)rosion of trust to widespread misinformation. Existing hallucination evaluation, however, focuses only on "correctness" and often overlooks "consistency", necessary to distinguish and address these harms. To bridge this gap, we introduce _prompt multiplicity_, a framework for quantifying consistency through prompt sensitivity. Our analysis reveals significant multiplicity (over 50% inconsistency in benchmarks like Med-HALT), suggesting that hallucination-related harms have been severely underestimated. Furthermore, we study the role of consistency in hallucination detection and mitigation. We find that: (a) detection techniques capture consistency, not correctness, and (b) mitigation techniques like RAG can introduce additional inconsistencies. By integrating prompt multiplicity into hallucination evaluation, we provide an improved framework of potential harms and uncover critical limitations in current detection and mitigation strategies.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/BuildingTrust (accepted)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Scaling Deep Learning Solutions for Transition Path Sampling
Jungyoon Lee
Michael Plainer
Yuanqi Du
Lars Holdijk
Rob Brekelmans
Carla P Gomes
Dominique Beaini
Kirill Neklyudov
Transition path sampling (TPS) is an important method for studying rare events, such as they happen in chemical reactions or protein folding… (see more). These events occur so infrequently that traditional simulations are often impractical, and even recent machine-learning approaches struggle to address this issue for larger systems. In this paper, we propose using modern deep learning techniques to improve the scalability of TPS methods significantly. We highlight the need for better evaluations in the existing literature and start by formulating TPS as a sampling problem over an unnormalized target density and introduce relevant evaluation metrics to assess the effectiveness of TPS solutions from this perspective. To develop a scalable approach, we explore several design choices, including a problem-informed neural network architecture, simulated annealing, the integration of prior knowledge into the sampling process, and attention mechanisms. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study and compare these design choices with other recently developed deep-learning methods for rare event sampling.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/GEM (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
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
Training Plug-n-Play Knowledge Modules with Deep Context Distillation
Lucas Caccia
Alan Ansell
Edoardo Ponti
Ivan Vulić
Alessandro Sordoni
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/MCDC (accepted)
doi.org
openreview.net
Understanding (Un)Reliability of Steering Vectors in Language Models
Joschka Braun
Carsten Eickhoff
David M. Krueger
Seyed Ali Bahrainian
Dmitrii Krasheninnikov
Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. … (see more)Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or even counterproductive in some cases. This paper studies the influence of prompt types and the geometry of activation differences on steering reliability. First, we find that all seven prompt types used in our experiments produce a net positive steering effect, but exhibit high variance across samples, and often give an effect opposite of the desired one. No prompt type clearly outperforms the others, and yet the steering vectors resulting from the different prompt types often differ directionally (as measured by cosine similarity). Second, we show that higher cosine similarity between training set activation differences predicts more effective steering. Finally, we observe that datasets where positive and negative activations are better separated are more steerable. Our results suggest that vector steering is unreliable when the target behavior is not represented by a coherent direction.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/Bi-Align (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
UNLEARNING GEO-CULTURAL STEREOTYPES IN MULTILINGUAL LLMS
Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah
Aditi Khandelwal
Negar Rostamzadeh
Golnoosh Farnadi
As multilingual generative models become more widely used, most safety and fairness evaluation techniques still focus on English-language re… (see more)sources, while overlooking important cross-cultural factors. This limitation raises concerns about fairness and safety, particularly regarding geoculturally situated stereotypes that hinder the models’ global inclusivity. In this work, we present preliminary findings on the impact of stereotype unlearning across languages, specifically in English, French, and Hindi. Using an adapted version of the SeeGULL dataset, we analyze how unlearning stereotypes in one language influences other languages within multilingual large language models. Our study evaluates two model families, Llama-3.1-8B and Aya-Expanse-8B, to assess whether unlearning in one linguistic context transfers across languages, potentially mitigating or exacerbating biases in multilingual settings.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/BuildingTrust (accepted)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Augmented Conditioning is Enough for Effective Training Image Generation
Jiahui Chen
Amy Zhang
Adriana Romero
Image generation abilities of text-to-image diffusion models have significantly advanced, yielding highly photo-realistic images from descri… (see more)ptive text and increasing the viability of leveraging synthetic images to train computer vision models. To serve as effective training data, generated images must be highly realistic while also sufficiently diverse within the support of the target data distribution. Yet, state-of-the-art conditional image generation models have been primarily optimized for creative applications, prioritizing image realism and prompt adherence over conditional diversity. In this paper, we investigate how to improve the diversity of generated images with the goal of increasing their effectiveness to train downstream image classification models, without fine-tuning the image generation model. We find that conditioning the generation process on an augmented real image and text prompt produces generations that serve as effective synthetic datasets for downstream training. Conditioning on real training images contextualizes the generation process to produce images that are in-domain with the real image distribution, while data augmentations introduce visual diversity that improves the performance of the downstream classifier. We validate augmentation-conditioning on a total of five established long-tail and few-shot im- age classification benchmarks and show that leveraging augmentations to condition the generation process results in consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art on the long-tailed benchmark and remarkable gains in extreme few-shot regimes of the remaining four benchmarks. These results constitute an important step towards effectively leveraging synthetic data for downstream training.
2025-03-03
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/SynthData (published)
doi.org
openreview.net