Portrait de Rishabh Agarwal

Rishabh Agarwal

Membre industriel associé
Professeur associé, McGill University, École d'informatique
Google DeepMind
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
Grands modèles de langage (LLM)

Biographie

Je suis chercheur dans l'équipe DeepMind de Google à Montréal, professeur adjoint à l'Université McGill et membre industriel associé à Mila - Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle. J'ai réalisé mon doctorat au sein de Mila sous la supervision d'Aaron Courville et Marc Bellemare. Avant cela, j'ai eu l'opportunité de travailler pendant un an avec l'équipe de Geoffrey Hinton chez Google Brain, à Toronto. J'ai obtenu mon diplôme en informatique et en ingénierie à l'IIT Bombay.

Mes recherches se concentrent sur les modèles de langage et l'apprentissage par renforcement profond (RL). J'ai eu l'honneur de recevoir un prix pour un article exceptionnel présenté à NeurIPS.

Étudiants actuels

Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

Many-Shot In-Context Learning
Avi Singh
Lei M Zhang
Bernd Bohnet
Stephanie C.Y. Chan
Ankesh Anand
Zaheer Abbas
Azade Nova
John D Co-Reyes
Eric Chu
Feryal Behbahani
Aleksandra Faust
Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from a few examples provided in context at inference, w… (voir plus)ithout any weight updates. Newly expanded context windows allow us to investigate ICL with hundreds or thousands of examples -- the many-shot regime. Going from few-shot to many-shot, we observe significant performance gains across a wide variety of generative and discriminative tasks. While promising, many-shot ICL can be bottlenecked by the available amount of human-generated examples. To mitigate this limitation, we explore two new settings: Reinforced and Unsupervised ICL. Reinforced ICL uses model-generated chain-of-thought rationales in place of human examples. Unsupervised ICL removes rationales from the prompt altogether, and prompts the model only with domain-specific questions. We find that both Reinforced and Unsupervised ICL can be quite effective in the many-shot regime, particularly on complex reasoning tasks. Finally, we demonstrate that, unlike few-shot learning, many-shot learning is effective at overriding pretraining biases, can learn high-dimensional functions with numerical inputs, and performs comparably to fine-tuning. We also find that inference cost increases linearly in the many-shot regime, and frontier LLMs benefit from many-shot ICL to varying degrees. Our analysis also reveals the limitations of next-token prediction loss as an indicator of downstream ICL performance.
Many-Shot In-Context Learning
Avi Singh
Lei M Zhang
Bernd Bohnet
Stephanie C.Y. Chan
Ankesh Anand
Zaheer Abbas
Azade Nova
John D Co-Reyes
Eric Chu
Feryal Behbahani
Aleksandra Faust
Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from a few examples provided in context at inference, w… (voir plus)ithout any weight updates. Newly expanded context windows allow us to investigate ICL with hundreds or thousands of examples -- the many-shot regime. Going from few-shot to many-shot, we observe significant performance gains across a wide variety of generative and discriminative tasks. While promising, many-shot ICL can be bottlenecked by the available amount of human-generated examples. To mitigate this limitation, we explore two new settings: Reinforced and Unsupervised ICL. Reinforced ICL uses model-generated chain-of-thought rationales in place of human examples. Unsupervised ICL removes rationales from the prompt altogether, and prompts the model only with domain-specific questions. We find that both Reinforced and Unsupervised ICL can be quite effective in the many-shot regime, particularly on complex reasoning tasks. Finally, we demonstrate that, unlike few-shot learning, many-shot learning is effective at overriding pretraining biases, can learn high-dimensional functions with numerical inputs, and performs comparably to fine-tuning. We also find that inference cost increases linearly in the many-shot regime, and frontier LLMs benefit from many-shot ICL to varying degrees. Our analysis also reveals the limitations of next-token prediction loss as an indicator of downstream ICL performance.
Many-Shot In-Context Learning
Avi Singh
Lei M Zhang
Bernd Bohnet
Stephanie C.Y. Chan
Ankesh Anand
Zaheer Abbas
Azade Nova
John D Co-Reyes
Eric Chu
Feryal Behbahani
Aleksandra Faust
Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from a few examples provided in context at inference, w… (voir plus)ithout any weight updates. Newly expanded context windows allow us to investigate ICL with hundreds or thousands of examples -- the many-shot regime. Going from few-shot to many-shot, we observe significant performance gains across a wide variety of generative and discriminative tasks. While promising, many-shot ICL can be bottlenecked by the available amount of human-generated examples. To mitigate this limitation, we explore two new settings: Reinforced and Unsupervised ICL. Reinforced ICL uses model-generated chain-of-thought rationales in place of human examples. Unsupervised ICL removes rationales from the prompt altogether, and prompts the model only with domain-specific questions. We find that both Reinforced and Unsupervised ICL can be quite effective in the many-shot regime, particularly on complex reasoning tasks. Finally, we demonstrate that, unlike few-shot learning, many-shot learning is effective at overriding pretraining biases, can learn high-dimensional functions with numerical inputs, and performs comparably to fine-tuning. We also find that inference cost increases linearly in the many-shot regime, and frontier LLMs benefit from many-shot ICL to varying degrees. Our analysis also reveals the limitations of next-token prediction loss as an indicator of downstream ICL performance.
Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL
Jesse Farebrother
Jordi Orbay
Quan Ho Vuong
Adrien Ali Taiga
Yevgen Chebotar
Ted Xiao
A. Irpan
Sergey Levine
Aleksandra Faust
Aviral Kumar
Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained … (voir plus)using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However, scaling value-based RL methods that use regression to large networks, such as high-capacity Transformers, has proven challenging. This difficulty is in stark contrast to supervised learning: by leveraging a cross-entropy classification loss, supervised methods have scaled reliably to massive networks. Observing this discrepancy, in this paper, we investigate whether the scalability of deep RL can also be improved simply by using classification in place of regression for training value functions. We demonstrate that value functions trained with categorical cross-entropy significantly improves performance and scalability in a variety of domains. These include: single-task RL on Atari 2600 games with SoftMoEs, multi-task RL on Atari with large-scale ResNets, robotic manipulation with Q-transformers, playing Chess without search, and a language-agent Wordle task with high-capacity Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art results on these domains. Through careful analysis, we show that the benefits of categorical cross-entropy primarily stem from its ability to mitigate issues inherent to value-based RL, such as noisy targets and non-stationarity. Overall, we argue that a simple shift to training value functions with categorical cross-entropy can yield substantial improvements in the scalability of deep RL at little-to-no cost.
Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL
Jesse Farebrother
Jordi Orbay
Quan Vuong
Adrien Ali Taiga
Yevgen Chebotar
Ted Xiao
Alex Irpan
Sergey Levine
Aleksandra Faust
Aviral Kumar
Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained … (voir plus)using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However, scaling value-based RL methods that use regression to large networks, such as high-capacity Transformers, has proven challenging. This difficulty is in stark contrast to supervised learning: by leveraging a cross-entropy classification loss, supervised methods have scaled reliably to massive networks. Observing this discrepancy, in this paper, we investigate whether the scalability of deep RL can also be improved simply by using classification in place of regression for training value functions. We demonstrate that value functions trained with categorical cross-entropy significantly improves performance and scalability in a variety of domains. These include: single-task RL on Atari 2600 games with SoftMoEs, multi-task RL on Atari with large-scale ResNets, robotic manipulation with Q-transformers, playing Chess without search, and a language-agent Wordle task with high-capacity Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art results on these domains. Through careful analysis, we show that the benefits of categorical cross-entropy primarily stem from its ability to mitigate issues inherent to value-based RL, such as noisy targets and non-stationarity. Overall, we argue that a simple shift to training value functions with categorical cross-entropy can yield substantial improvements in the scalability of deep RL at little-to-no cost.
Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL
Jesse Farebrother
Jordi Orbay
Quan Vuong
Adrien Ali Taiga
Yevgen Chebotar
Ted Xiao
Alex Irpan
Sergey Levine
Aleksandra Faust
Aviral Kumar
Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained … (voir plus)using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However, scaling value-based RL methods that use regression to large networks, such as high-capacity Transformers, has proven challenging. This difficulty is in stark contrast to supervised learning: by leveraging a cross-entropy classification loss, supervised methods have scaled reliably to massive networks. Observing this discrepancy, in this paper, we investigate whether the scalability of deep RL can also be improved simply by using classification in place of regression for training value functions. We demonstrate that value functions trained with categorical cross-entropy significantly improves performance and scalability in a variety of domains. These include: single-task RL on Atari 2600 games with SoftMoEs, multi-task RL on Atari with large-scale ResNets, robotic manipulation with Q-transformers, playing Chess without search, and a language-agent Wordle task with high-capacity Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art results on these domains. Through careful analysis, we show that the benefits of categorical cross-entropy primarily stem from its ability to mitigate issues inherent to value-based RL, such as noisy targets and non-stationarity. Overall, we argue that a simple shift to training value functions with categorical cross-entropy can yield substantial improvements in the scalability of deep RL at little-to-no cost.
Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL
Jesse Farebrother
Jordi Orbay
Quan Vuong
Adrien Ali Taiga
Yevgen Chebotar
Ted Xiao
Alex Irpan
Sergey Levine
Aleksandra Faust
Aviral Kumar
Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained … (voir plus)using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However, scaling value-based RL methods that use regression to large networks, such as high-capacity Transformers, has proven challenging. This difficulty is in stark contrast to supervised learning: by leveraging a cross-entropy classification loss, supervised methods have scaled reliably to massive networks. Observing this discrepancy, in this paper, we investigate whether the scalability of deep RL can also be improved simply by using classification in place of regression for training value functions. We demonstrate that value functions trained with categorical cross-entropy significantly improves performance and scalability in a variety of domains. These include: single-task RL on Atari 2600 games with SoftMoEs, multi-task RL on Atari with large-scale ResNets, robotic manipulation with Q-transformers, playing Chess without search, and a language-agent Wordle task with high-capacity Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art results on these domains. Through careful analysis, we show that the benefits of categorical cross-entropy primarily stem from its ability to mitigate issues inherent to value-based RL, such as noisy targets and non-stationarity. Overall, we argue that a simple shift to training value functions with categorical cross-entropy can yield substantial improvements in the scalability of deep RL at little-to-no cost.
V-STaR: Training Verifiers for Self-Taught Reasoners
Arian Hosseini
Xingdi Yuan
Nikolay Malkin
Common self-improvement approaches for large language models (LLMs), such as STaR, iteratively fine-tune LLMs on self-generated solutions to… (voir plus) improve their problem-solving ability. However, these approaches discard the large amounts of incorrect solutions generated during this process, potentially neglecting valuable information in such solutions. To address this shortcoming, we propose V-STaR that utilizes both the correct and incorrect solutions generated during the self-improvement process to train a verifier using DPO that judges correctness of model-generated solutions. This verifier is used at inference time to select one solution among many candidate solutions. Running V-STaR for multiple iterations results in progressively better reasoners and verifiers, delivering a 4% to 17% test accuracy improvement over existing self-improvement and verification approaches on common code generation and math reasoning benchmarks with LLaMA2 models.
V-STaR: Training Verifiers for Self-Taught Reasoners
Arian Hosseini
Xingdi Yuan
Nikolay Malkin
Common self-improvement approaches for large language models (LLMs), such as STaR (Zelikman et al., 2022), iteratively fine-tune LLMs on sel… (voir plus)f-generated solutions to improve their problem-solving ability. However, these approaches discard the large amounts of incorrect solutions generated during this process, potentially neglecting valuable information in such solutions. To address this shortcoming, we propose V-STaR that utilizes both the correct and incorrect solutions generated during the self-improvement process to train a verifier using DPO that judges correctness of model-generated solutions. This verifier is used at inference time to select one solution among many candidate solutions. Running V-STaR for multiple iterations results in progressively better reasoners and verifiers, delivering a 4% to 17% test accuracy improvement over existing self-improvement and verification approaches on common code generation and math reasoning benchmarks with LLaMA2 models.
V-STaR: Training Verifiers for Self-Taught Reasoners
Arian Hosseini
Xingdi Yuan
Nikolay Malkin
Common self-improvement approaches for large language models (LLMs), such as STaR, iteratively fine-tune LLMs on self-generated solutions to… (voir plus) improve their problem-solving ability. However, these approaches discard the large amounts of incorrect solutions generated during this process, potentially neglecting valuable information in such solutions. To address this shortcoming, we propose V-STaR that utilizes both the correct and incorrect solutions generated during the self-improvement process to train a verifier using DPO that judges correctness of model-generated solutions. This verifier is used at inference time to select one solution among many candidate solutions. Running V-STaR for multiple iterations results in progressively better reasoners and verifiers, delivering a 4% to 17% test accuracy improvement over existing self-improvement and verification approaches on common code generation and math reasoning benchmarks with LLaMA2 models.
V-STaR: Training Verifiers for Self-Taught Reasoners
Arian Hosseini
Xingdi Yuan
Nikolay Malkin
Common self-improvement approaches for large language models (LLMs), such as STaR, iteratively fine-tune LLMs on self-generated solutions to… (voir plus) improve their problem-solving ability. However, these approaches discard the large amounts of incorrect solutions generated during this process, potentially neglecting valuable information in such solutions. To address this shortcoming, we propose V-STaR that utilizes both the correct and incorrect solutions generated during the self-improvement process to train a verifier using DPO that judges correctness of model-generated solutions. This verifier is used at inference time to select one solution among many candidate solutions. Running V-STaR for multiple iterations results in progressively better reasoners and verifiers, delivering a 4% to 17% test accuracy improvement over existing self-improvement and verification approaches on common code generation and math reasoning benchmarks with LLaMA2 models.
V-STaR: Training Verifiers for Self-Taught Reasoners
Arian Hosseini
Xingdi Yuan
Nikolay Malkin
Common self-improvement approaches for large language models (LLMs), such as STaR, iteratively fine-tune LLMs on self-generated solutions to… (voir plus) improve their problem-solving ability. However, these approaches discard the large amounts of incorrect solutions generated during this process, potentially neglecting valuable information in such solutions. To address this shortcoming, we propose V-STaR that utilizes both the correct and incorrect solutions generated during the self-improvement process to train a verifier using DPO that judges correctness of model-generated solutions. This verifier is used at inference time to select one solution among many candidate solutions. Running V-STaR for multiple iterations results in progressively better reasoners and verifiers, delivering a 4% to 17% test accuracy improvement over existing self-improvement and verification approaches on common code generation and math reasoning benchmarks with LLaMA2 models.