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Dario Amodei

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

5 papers
2 author rows

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5

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

  • Tom Brown
  • Benjamin Mann
  • Nick Ryder
  • Melanie Subbiah
  • Jared D Kaplan
  • Prafulla Dhariwal
  • Arvind Neelakantan
  • Pranav Shyam

We demonstrate that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even becoming competitive with prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches. Specifically, we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, 10x more than any previous non-sparse language model, and test its performance in the few-shot setting. For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model. GPT-3 achieves strong performance on many NLP datasets, including translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks. We also identify some datasets where GPT-3's few-shot learning still struggles, as well as some datasets where GPT-3 faces methodological issues related to training on large web corpora.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Learning to summarize with human feedback

  • Nisan Stiennon
  • Long Ouyang
  • Jeffrey Wu
  • Daniel Ziegler
  • Ryan Lowe
  • Chelsea Voss
  • Alec Radford
  • Dario Amodei

As language models become more powerful, training and evaluation are increasingly bottlenecked by the data and metrics used for a particular task. For example, summarization models are often trained to predict human reference summaries and evaluated using ROUGE, but both of these metrics are rough proxies for what we really care about---summary quality. In this work, we show that it is possible to significantly improve summary quality by training a model to optimize for human preferences. We collect a large, high-quality dataset of human comparisons between summaries, train a model to predict the human-preferred summary, and use that model as a reward function to fine-tune a summarization policy using reinforcement learning. We apply our method to a version of the TL; DR dataset of Reddit posts and find that our models significantly outperform both human reference summaries and much larger models fine-tuned with supervised learning alone. Our models also transfer to CNN/DM news articles, producing summaries nearly as good as the human reference without any news-specific fine-tuning. We conduct extensive analyses to understand our human feedback dataset and fine-tuned models. We establish that our reward model generalizes to new datasets, and that optimizing our reward model results in better summaries than optimizing ROUGE according to humans. We hope the evidence from our paper motivates machine learning researchers to pay closer attention to how their training loss affects the model behavior they actually want.

NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Reward learning from human preferences and demonstrations in Atari

  • Borja Ibarz
  • Jan Leike
  • Tobias Pohlen
  • Geoffrey Irving
  • Shane Legg
  • Dario Amodei

To solve complex real-world problems with reinforcement learning, we cannot rely on manually specified reward functions. Instead, we need humans to communicate an objective to the agent directly. In this work, we combine two approaches to this problem: learning from expert demonstrations and learning from trajectory preferences. We use both to train a deep neural network to model the reward function and use its predicted reward to train an DQN-based deep reinforcement learning agent on 9 Atari games. Our approach beats the imitation learning baseline in 7 games and achieves strictly superhuman performance on 2 games. Additionally, we investigate the fit of the reward model, present some reward hacking problems, and study the effects of noise in the human labels.

NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences

  • Paul Christiano
  • Jan Leike
  • Tom Brown
  • Miljan Martic
  • Shane Legg
  • Dario Amodei

For sophisticated reinforcement learning (RL) systems to interact usefully with real-world environments, we need to communicate complex goals to these systems. In this work, we explore goals defined in terms of (non-expert) human preferences between pairs of trajectory segments. Our approach separates learning the goal from learning the behavior to achieve it. We show that this approach can effectively solve complex RL tasks without access to the reward function, including Atari games and simulated robot locomotion, while providing feedback on about 0. 1% of our agent's interactions with the environment. This reduces the cost of human oversight far enough that it can be practically applied to state-of-the-art RL systems. To demonstrate the flexibility of our approach, we show that we can successfully train complex novel behaviors with about an hour of human time. These behaviors and environments are considerably more complex than any which have been previously learned from human feedback.

ICML Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin

  • Dario Amodei
  • Sundaram Ananthanarayanan
  • Rishita Anubhai
  • Jingliang Bai
  • Eric Battenberg
  • Carl Case
  • Jared Casper
  • Bryan Catanzaro

We show that an end-to-end deep learning approach can be used to recognize either English or Mandarin Chinese speech–two vastly different languages. Because it replaces entire pipelines of hand-engineered components with neural networks, end-to-end learning allows us to handle a diverse variety of speech including noisy environments, accents and different languages. Key to our approach is our application of HPC techniques, enabling experiments that previously took weeks to now run in days. This allows us to iterate more quickly to identify superior architectures and algorithms. As a result, in several cases, our system is competitive with the transcription of human workers when benchmarked on standard datasets. Finally, using a technique called Batch Dispatch with GPUs in the data center, we show that our system can be inexpensively deployed in an online setting, delivering low latency when serving users at scale.

v2026.09.13