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Noah D. Goodman

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19 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Eliciting Human Preferences with Language Models

Belinda Z. Li
Alex Tamkin
Noah D. Goodman
Jacob Andreas

Language models (LMs) can be directed to perform user- and context-dependent tasks by using labeled examples or natural language prompts. But selecting examples or writing prompts can be challenging---especially in tasks that require users to precisely articulate nebulous preferences or reason about complex edge cases. For such tasks, we introduce **Generative Active Task Elicitation (GATE)**, a method for using *LMs themselves* to guide the task specification process. GATE is a learning framework in which models elicit and infer human preferences through free-form, language-based interaction with users. We identify prototypical challenges that users face when specifying preferences, and design three preference modeling tasks to study these challenges: content recommendation, moral reasoning, and email validation. In preregistered experiments, we show that LMs that learn to perform these tasks using GATE (by interactively querying users with open-ended questions) obtain preference specifications that are more informative than user-written prompts or examples. GATE matches existing task specification methods in the moral reasoning task, and significantly outperforms them in the content recommendation and email validation tasks. Users additionally report that interactive task elicitation requires less effort than prompting or example labeling and surfaces considerations that they did not anticipate on their own. Our findings suggest that LM-driven elicitation can be a powerful tool for aligning models to complex human preferences and values.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

What Makes a Maze Look Like a Maze?

Joy Hsu
Jiayuan Mao
Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Noah D. Goodman
Jiajun Wu 0001

A unique aspect of human visual understanding is the ability to flexibly interpret abstract concepts: acquiring lifted rules explaining what they symbolize, grounding them across familiar and unfamiliar contexts, and making predictions or reasoning about them. While off-the-shelf vision-language models excel at making literal interpretations of images (e.g., recognizing object categories such as tree branches), they still struggle to make sense of such visual abstractions (e.g., how an arrangement of tree branches may form the walls of a maze). To address this challenge, we introduce Deep Schema Grounding (DSG), a framework that leverages explicit structured representations of visual abstractions for grounding and reasoning. At the core of DSG are schemas—dependency graph descriptions of abstract concepts that decompose them into more primitive-level symbols. DSG uses large language models to extract schemas, then hierarchically grounds concrete to abstract components of the schema onto images with vision-language models. The grounded schema is used to augment visual abstraction understanding. We systematically evaluate DSG and different methods in reasoning on our new Visual Abstractions Benchmark, which consists of diverse, real-world images of abstract concepts and corresponding question-answer pairs labeled by humans. We show that DSG significantly improves the abstract visual reasoning performance of vision-language models, and is a step toward human-aligned understanding of visual abstractions.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Automated Statistical Model Discovery with Language Models

Michael Y. Li
Emily B. Fox
Noah D. Goodman

Statistical model discovery is a challenging search over a vast space of models subject to domain-specific constraints. Efficiently searching over this space requires expertise in modeling and the problem domain. Motivated by the domain knowledge and programming capabilities of large language models (LMs), we introduce a method for language model driven automated statistical model discovery. We cast our automated procedure within the principled framework of Box’s Loop: the LM iterates between proposing statistical models represented as probabilistic programs, acting as a modeler, and critiquing those models, acting as a domain expert. By leveraging LMs, we do not have to define a domain-specific language of models or design a handcrafted search procedure, which are key restrictions of previous systems. We evaluate our method in three settings in probabilistic modeling: searching within a restricted space of models, searching over an open-ended space, and improving expert models under natural language constraints (e. g. , this model should be interpretable to an ecologist). Our method identifies models on par with human expert designed models and extends classic models in interpretable ways. Our results highlight the promise of LM-driven model discovery.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Codebook Features: Sparse and Discrete Interpretability for Neural Networks

Alex Tamkin
Mohammad Taufeeque
Noah D. Goodman

Understanding neural networks is challenging in part because of the dense, continuous nature of their hidden states. We explore whether we can train neural networks to have hidden states that are sparse, discrete, and more interpretable by quantizing their continuous features into what we call codebook features. Codebook features are produced by finetuning neural networks with vector quantization bottlenecks at each layer, producing a network whose hidden features are the sum of a small number of discrete vector codes chosen from a larger codebook. Surprisingly, we find that neural networks can operate under this extreme bottleneck with only modest degradation in performance. In addition, we can control a model’s behavior by finding codes that activate on a desired behavior, then activating those same codes during generation. We first validate codebook features on a finite state machine dataset with far more hidden states than neurons. In this setting, our approach overcomes the superposition problem by assigning states to distinct codes, and we find that we can make the neural network behave as if it is in a different state by activating the code for that state. We then train Transformer language models with up to 410M parameters on two natural language datasets. We identify codes in these models representing diverse, disentangled concepts (ranging from negative emotions to months of the year) and find that we can guide the model to generate different topics and pronoun genders by activating these codes during inference. Overall, codebook features appear to be a promising unit of analysis and control for neural networks and interpretability. Our codebase and models are open-sourced at this URL.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Hypothesis Search: Inductive Reasoning with Language Models

Ruocheng Wang
Eric Zelikman
Gabriel Poesia
Yewen Pu
Nick Haber
Noah D. Goodman

Inductive reasoning is a core problem-solving capacity: humans can identify underlying principles from a few examples, which can then be robustly generalized to novel scenarios. Recent work has evaluated large language models (LLMs) on inductive reasoning tasks by directly prompting them yielding "in context learning." This can work well for straightforward inductive tasks, but performs very poorly on more complex tasks such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC). In this work, we propose to improve the inductive reasoning ability of LLMs by generating explicit hypotheses at multiple levels of abstraction: we prompt the LLM to propose multiple abstract hypotheses about the problem, in natural language, then implement the natural language hypotheses as concrete Python programs. These programs can be directly verified by running on the observed examples and generalized to novel inputs. To reduce the hypothesis search space, we explore steps to filter the set of hypotheses to be implemented as programs: we either ask the LLM to summarize them into a smaller set of hypotheses, or ask human annotators to select a subset. We verify our pipeline's effectiveness on the ARC visual inductive reasoning benchmark, its variant 1D-ARC, and string transformation dataset SyGuS. On a random 40-problem subset of ARC, our automated pipeline using LLM summaries achieves 27.5% accuracy, significantly outperforming the direct prompting baseline (accuracy of 12.5%). With the minimal human input of selecting from LLM-generated candidates, the performance is boosted to 37.5%. Our ablation studies show that abstract hypothesis generation and concrete program representations are both beneficial for LLMs to perform inductive reasoning tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Learning Formal Mathematics From Intrinsic Motivation

Gabriel Poesia
David Broman
Nick Haber
Noah D. Goodman

How did humanity coax mathematics from the aether? We explore the Platonic view that mathematics can be discovered from its axioms---a game of conjecture and proof. We describe an agent that jointly learns to pose challenging problems for itself (conjecturing) and solve them (theorem proving). Given a mathematical domain axiomatized in dependent type theory, we first combine methods for constrained decoding and type-directed synthesis to sample valid conjectures from a language model. Our method guarantees well-formed conjectures by construction, even as we start with a randomly initialized model. We use the same model to represent a policy and value function for guiding proof search. Our agent targets generating hard but provable conjectures --- a moving target, since its own theorem proving ability also improves as it trains. We propose novel methods for hindsight relabeling on proof search trees to significantly improve the agent's sample efficiency in both tasks. Experiments on 3 axiomatic domains (propositional logic, arithmetic and group theory) demonstrate that our agent can bootstrap from only the axioms, self-improving in generating true and challenging conjectures and in finding proofs.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

On scalable oversight with weak LLMs judging strong LLMs

Zachary Kenton
Noah Y. Siegel
János Kramár
Jonah Brown-Cohen
Samuel Albanie
Jannis Bulian
Rishabh Agarwal
David Lindner

Scalable oversight protocols aim to enable humans to accurately supervise superhuman AI. In this paper we study debate, where two AI's compete to convince a judge; consultancy, where a single AI tries to convince a judge that asks questions; and compare to a baseline of direct question-answering, where the judge just answers outright without the AI. We use large language models (LLMs) as both AI agents and as stand-ins for human judges, taking the judge models to be weaker than agent models. We benchmark on a diverse range of asymmetries between judges and agents, extending previous work on a single extractive QA task with information asymmetry, to also include mathematics, coding, logic and multimodal reasoning asymmetries. We find that debate outperforms consultancy across all tasks when the consultant is randomly assigned to argue for the correct/incorrect answer. Comparing debate to direct question answering, the results depend on the type of task: in extractive QA tasks with information asymmetry debate outperforms direct question answering, but in other tasks without information asymmetry the results are mixed. Previous work assigned debaters/consultants an answer to argue for. When we allow them to instead choose which answer to argue for, we find judges are less frequently convinced by the wrong answer in debate than in consultancy. Further, we find that stronger debater models increase judge accuracy, though more modestly than in previous studies.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Self-Supervised Alignment with Mutual Information: Learning to Follow Principles without Preference Labels

Jan-Philipp Fränken
Eric Zelikman
Rafael Rafailov
Kanishk Gandhi
Tobias Gerstenberg
Noah D. Goodman

When prompting a language model (LM), users often expect the model to adhere to a set of behavioral principles across diverse tasks, such as producing insightful content while avoiding harmful or biased language. Instilling such principles (i. e. , a constitution) into a model is resource-intensive, technically challenging, and generally requires human preference labels or examples. We introduce SAMI, an iterative algorithm that finetunes a pretrained language model (without requiring preference labels or demonstrations) to increase the conditional mutual information between constitutions and self-generated responses given queries from a dataset. On single-turn dialogue and summarization, a SAMI-trained mistral-7b outperforms the initial pretrained model, with win rates between 66% and 77%. Strikingly, it also surpasses an instruction-finetuned baseline (mistral-7b-instruct) with win rates between 55% and 57% on single-turn dialogue. SAMI requires a model that writes the principles. To avoid dependence on strong models for writing principles, we align a strong pretrained model (mixtral-8x7b) using constitutions written by a weak instruction-finetuned model (mistral-7b-instruct), achieving a 65% win rate on summarization. Finally, we investigate whether SAMI generalizes to diverse summarization principles (e. g. , "summaries should be scientific") and scales to stronger models (llama3-70b), finding that it achieves win rates of up to 68% for learned and 67% for held-out principles compared to the base model. Our results show that a pretrained LM can learn to follow constitutions without using preference labels, demonstrations, or human oversight.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Generating Language Corrections for Teaching Physical Control Tasks

Megha Srivastava
Noah D. Goodman
Dorsa Sadigh

AI assistance continues to help advance applications in education, from language learning to intelligent tutoring systems, yet current methods for providing students feedback are still quite limited. Most automatic feedback systems either provide binary correctness feedback, which may not help a student understand how to improve, or require hand-coding feedback templates, which may not generalize to new domains. This can be particularly challenging for physical control tasks, where the rich diversity in student behavior and specialized domains make it challenging to leverage general-purpose assistive tools for providing feedback. We design and build CORGI, a model trained to generate language corrections for physical control tasks, such as learning to ride a bike. CORGI takes in as input a pair of student and expert trajectories, and then generates natural language corrections to help the student improve. We collect and train CORGI over data from three diverse physical control tasks (drawing, steering, and joint movement). Through both automatic and human evaluations, we show that CORGI can (i) generate valid feedback for novel student trajectories, (ii) outperform baselines on domains with novel control dynamics, and (iii) improve student learning in an interactive drawing task.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Task Ambiguity in Humans and Language Models

Alex Tamkin
Kunal Handa
Avash Shrestha
Noah D. Goodman

Language models have recently achieved strong performance across a wide range of NLP benchmarks. However, real world tasks are often poorly specified, and agents must deduce the intended behavior from a combination of context, instructions, and examples. We investigate how both humans and models behave in the face of such task ambiguity by proposing AmbiBench, a new benchmark of six ambiguously-specified classification tasks. We evaluate humans and models on AmbiBench by seeing how well they identify the intended task using 1) instructions with varying degrees of ambiguity, and 2) different numbers of labeled examples. We find that the combination of model scaling (to 175B parameters) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) enables models to approach or exceed the accuracy of human participants across tasks, but that either one of these alone is not sufficient. In addition, we show how to dramatically improve the accuracy of language models trained without RLHF by finetuning on a small number of ambiguous in-context examples, providing a promising direction for teaching models to generalize well in the face of ambiguity.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Inducing Causal Structure for Interpretable Neural Networks

Atticus Geiger
Zhengxuan Wu
Hanson Lu
Josh Rozner
Elisa Kreiss
Thomas Icard
Noah D. Goodman
Christopher Potts

In many areas, we have well-founded insights about causal structure that would be useful to bring into our trained models while still allowing them to learn in a data-driven fashion. To achieve this, we present the new method of interchange intervention training (IIT). In IIT, we (1) align variables in a causal model (e. g. , a deterministic program or Bayesian network) with representations in a neural model and (2) train the neural model to match the counterfactual behavior of the causal model on a base input when aligned representations in both models are set to be the value they would be for a source input. IIT is fully differentiable, flexibly combines with other objectives, and guarantees that the target causal model is a causal abstraction of the neural model when its loss is zero. We evaluate IIT on a structural vision task (MNIST-PVR), a navigational language task (ReaSCAN), and a natural language inference task (MQNLI). We compare IIT against multi-task training objectives and data augmentation. In all our experiments, IIT achieves the best results and produces neural models that are more interpretable in the sense that they more successfully realize the target causal model.

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ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Language modeling via stochastic processes

Rose E. Wang
Esin Durmus
Noah D. Goodman
Tatsunori B. Hashimoto

Modern language models can generate high-quality short texts. However, they often meander or are incoherent when generating longer texts. These issues arise from the next-token-only language modeling objective. To address these issues, we introduce Time Control (TC), a language model that implicitly plans via a latent stochastic process. TC does this by learning a representation which maps the dynamics of how text changes in a document to the dynamics of a stochastic process of interest. Using this representation, the language model can generate text by first implicitly generating a document plan via a stochastic process, and then generating text that is consistent with this latent plan. Compared to domain-specific methods and fine-tuning GPT2 across a variety of text domains, TC improves performance on text infilling and discourse coherence. On long text generation settings, TC preserves the text structure both in terms of ordering (up to +40% better) and text length consistency (up to +17% better). Human evaluators also prefer TC's output 28.6% more than the baselines.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Conditional Negative Sampling for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations

Mike Wu
Milan Mossé
Chengxu Zhuang
Daniel L. K. Yamins
Noah D. Goodman

Recent methods for learning unsupervised visual representations, dubbed contrastive learning, optimize the noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) bound on mutual information between two transformations of an image. NCE typically uses randomly sampled negative examples to normalize the objective, but this may often include many uninformative examples either because they are too easy or too hard to discriminate. Taking inspiration from metric learning, we show that choosing semi-hard negatives can yield stronger contrastive representations. To do this, we introduce a family of mutual information estimators that sample negatives conditionally -- in a "ring" around each positive. We prove that these estimators remain lower-bounds of mutual information, with higher bias but lower variance than NCE. Experimentally, we find our approach, applied on top of existing models (IR, CMC, and MoCo) improves accuracy by 2-5% absolute points in each case, measured by linear evaluation on four standard image benchmarks. Moreover, we find continued benefits when transferring features to a variety of new image distributions from the Meta-Dataset collection and to a variety of downstream tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and key-point detection.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Viewmaker Networks: Learning Views for Unsupervised Representation Learning

Alex Tamkin
Mike Wu
Noah D. Goodman

Many recent methods for unsupervised representation learning train models to be invariant to different "views," or distorted versions of an input. However, designing these views requires considerable trial and error by human experts, hindering widespread adoption of unsupervised representation learning methods across domains and modalities. To address this, we propose viewmaker networks: generative models that learn to produce useful views from a given input. Viewmakers are stochastic bounded adversaries: they produce views by generating and then adding an $\ell_p$-bounded perturbation to the input, and are trained adversarially with respect to the main encoder network. Remarkably, when pretraining on CIFAR-10, our learned views enable comparable transfer accuracy to the well-tuned SimCLR augmentations---despite not including transformations like cropping or color jitter. Furthermore, our learned views significantly outperform baseline augmentations on speech recordings (+9 points on average) and wearable sensor data (+17 points on average). Viewmaker views can also be combined with handcrafted views: they improve robustness to common image corruptions and can increase transfer performance in cases where handcrafted views are less explored. These results suggest that viewmakers may provide a path towards more general representation learning algorithms---reducing the domain expertise and effort needed to pretrain on a much wider set of domains. Code is available at https://github.com/alextamkin/viewmaker.

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JMLR Journal 2019 Journal Article

Pyro: Deep Universal Probabilistic Programming

Eli Bingham
Jonathan P. Chen
Martin Jankowiak
Fritz Obermeyer
Neeraj Pradhan
Theofanis Karaletsos
Rohit Singh
Paul Szerlip

Pyro is a probabilistic programming language built on Python as a platform for developing advanced probabilistic models in AI research. To scale to large data sets and high-dimensional models, Pyro uses stochastic variational inference algorithms and probability distributions built on top of PyTorch, a modern GPU-accelerated deep learning framework. To accommodate complex or model-specific algorithmic behavior, Pyro leverages Poutine, a library of composable building blocks for modifying the behavior of probabilistic programs. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2019. ( edit, beta )

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ICML Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Tensor Variable Elimination for Plated Factor Graphs

Fritz Obermeyer
Eli Bingham
Martin Jankowiak
Neeraj Pradhan
Justin T. Chiu
Alexander M. Rush
Noah D. Goodman

A wide class of machine learning algorithms can be reduced to variable elimination on factor graphs. While factor graphs provide a unifying notation for these algorithms, they do not provide a compact way to express repeated structure when compared to plate diagrams for directed graphical models. To exploit efficient tensor algebra in graphs with plates of variables, we generalize undirected factor graphs to plated factor graphs and variable elimination to a tensor variable elimination algorithm that operates directly on plated factor graphs. Moreover, we generalize complexity bounds based on treewidth and characterize the class of plated factor graphs for which inference is tractable. As an application, we integrate tensor variable elimination into the Pyro probabilistic programming language to enable exact inference in discrete latent variable models with repeated structure. We validate our methods with experiments on both directed and undirected graphical models, including applications to polyphonic music modeling, animal movement modeling, and latent sentiment analysis.

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IJCAI Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Bayesian Policy Search with Policy Priors

David Wingate
Noah D. Goodman
Daniel M. Roy
Leslie P. Kaelbling
Joshua B. Tenenbaum

We consider the problem of learning to act in partially observable, continuous-state-and-action worlds where we have abstract prior knowledge about the structure of the optimal policy in the form of a distribution over policies. Using ideas from planning-as-inference reductions and Bayesian unsupervised learning, we cast Markov Chain Monte Carlo as a stochastic, hill-climbing policy search algorithm. Importantly, this algorithm's search bias is directly tied to the prior and its MCMC proposal kernels, which means we can draw on the full Bayesian toolbox to express the search bias, including nonparametric priors and structured, recursive processes like grammars over action sequences. Furthermore, we can reason about uncertainty in the search bias itself by constructing a hierarchical prior and reasoning about latent variables that determine the abstract structure of the policy. This yields an adaptive search algorithm---our algorithm learns to learn a structured policy efficiently. We show how inference over the latent variables in these policy priors enables intra- and intertask transfer of abstract knowledge. We demonstrate the flexibility of this approach by learning meta search biases, by constructing a nonparametric finite state controller to model memory, by discovering motor primitives using a simple grammar over primitive actions, and by combining all three.

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UAI Conference 2009 Conference Paper

The Infinite Latent Events Model

David Wingate
Noah D. Goodman
Daniel M. Roy 0001
Joshua B. Tenenbaum

We present the Infinite Latent Events Model, a nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian distribution over infinite dimensional Dynamic Bayesian Networks with binary state representations and noisy-OR-like transitions. The distribution can be used to learn structure in discrete timeseries data by simultaneously inferring a set of latent events, which events fired at each timestep, and how those events are causally linked. We illustrate the model on a sound factorization task, a network topology identification task, and a video game task.

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UAI Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Church: a language for generative models

Noah D. Goodman
Vikash K. Mansinghka
Daniel M. Roy 0001
Kallista A. Bonawitz
Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Formal languages for probabilistic modeling enable re-use, modularity, and descriptive clarity, and can foster generic inference techniques. We introduce Church, a universal language for describing stochastic generative processes. Church is based on the Lisp model of lambda calculus, containing a pure Lisp as its deterministic subset. The semantics of Church is defined in terms of evaluation histories and conditional distributions on such histories. Church also includes a novel language construct, the stochastic memoizer, which enables simple description of many complex non-parametric models. We illustrate language features through several examples, including: a generalized Bayes net in which parameters cluster over trials, infinite PCFGs, planning by inference, and various non-parametric clustering models. Finally, we show how to implement query on any Church program, exactly and approximately, using Monte Carlo techniques.

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