
Leitian Tao
@LeitianT
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3rd Machine Learning PhD student at @WisconsinCS | research scientist intern @AIatMeta FAIR | |ex Research intern @Adobe | BS 23' @WHU_1893
Joined November 2021
Excited to share our new work on Hybrid Reinforcement (HERO) — combining verifiable and reward-model signals for reasoning RL. Verifiers are precise but brittle. Reward models are rich but noisy. In our new paper HERO, we show how to combine both!
Hybrid Reinforcement (HERO): When Reward Is Sparse, It’s Better to Be Dense 🦸♂️ 💪 📝: https://t.co/VAXtSC4GGp - HERO bridges 0–1 verifiable rewards and dense reward models into one 'hybrid' RL method - Tackles the brittleness of binary signals and the noise of pure reward
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Human preference data is noisy: inconsistent labels, annotator bias, etc. No matter how fancy the post-training algorithm is, bad data can sink your model. 🔥 @Samuel861025 and I are thrilled to release PrefCleanBench — a systematic benchmark for evaluating data cleaning
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💃New Multi-Agent RL Method: WaltzRL💃 📝: https://t.co/KE8dM9kX1r - Makes LLM safety a positive-sum game between a conversation & feedback agent - At inference feedback is adaptive, used when needed -> Improves safety & reduces overrefusals without degrading capabilities! 🧵1/5
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Your LVLM says: “There’s a cat on the table.” But… there’s no cat in the image. Not even a whisker. This is object hallucination — one of the most persistent reliability failures in multi-modal language models. Our new #NeurIPS2025 paper introduces GLSim, a simple but
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Thrilled to announce our #NeurIPS2025 paper on LENS (Latent EmbeddiNg Synthesis)! LENS learns to synthesize preference pairs directly in latent space — 🚀 18× faster data generation ⚙️ 16 000× smaller model Efficient, theoretically grounded, and scalable reward modeling.
Collecting large human preference data is expensive—the biggest bottleneck in reward modeling. In our #NeurIPS2025 paper, we introduce latent-space synthesis for preference data, which is 18× faster and uses a network that’s 16,000× smaller (0.5M vs 8B parameters) than
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Excited to share our #NeurIPS2025 paper: Visual Instruction Bottleneck Tuning (Vittle) Multimodal LLMs do great in-distribution, but often break in the wild. Scaling data or models helps, but it’s costly. 💡 Our work is inspired by the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle,
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🌀New Self-Driven RL Method: RESTRAIN 🌀 📝: https://t.co/x4EgHfxZfG - RESTRAIN turns spurious votes → self-Improving signals. No labels needed - Does this through self-penalizing unreliable reasoning paths: ✔️ Uses all rollouts, not just the majority, ✔️ Offsets
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🌀New work: Era of Real-World Human Interaction 🌀 📝: https://t.co/qB1roKk6Ou - RL *directly* from User Conversations - Organic replies + long-term history are learning signal - Trained on WildChat, beats RLHF at *user* level -> the future for personal Super Intelligence? 🧵1/6
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🌀Diversity Aware RL (DARLING)🌀 📝: https://t.co/MH0tui34Cb - Jointly optimizes for quality & diversity using a learned partition function - Outperforms standard RL in quality AND diversity metrics, e.g. higher pass@1/p@k - Works for both non-verifiable & verifiable tasks 🧵1/5
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🪜Introducing: StepWiser🦉 📝: https://t.co/RXOjaMjHI1 - Reframes stepwise reward modeling as a reasoning task: outputs CoT + judgment. - Trained by RL using relative outcomes of rollouts. Results: (1) SOTA performance on ProcessBench! (2) Improves policy at train time. (3)
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BloomScrub🧽 is now accepted to EMNLP 2025 as a main conference paper! Check out our post below for a detailed summary⬇️
Current copyright mitigation methods for LLMs typically focus on average-case risks, but overlook worst-case scenarios involving long verbatim copying ⚠️. We propose BloomScrub 🧽, a method providing certified mitigation of worst-case infringement while preserving utility.
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A smarter way to teach LLMs. Meta and NYU propose CoT-Self-Instruct: a new method where LLMs first reason & plan via Chain-of-Thought (CoT), then generate high-quality synthetic prompts, filtered with automatic metrics. 🧠 Outperforms s1k/OpenMath on MATH500, AMC23, AIME24,
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Excited to be in Vancouver for ICML2025! I'll be presenting "Position: Challenges and Future Directions of Data-Centric AI Alignment" in East Exhibition Hall A-B #E-601 on Tuesday, 7/15, from 4:30 pm. Please come if you are interested in AI alignment! #ICML2025 #aialignment
📢 Looking for new research ideas in AI alignment? Check out our new #ICML2025 position paper: "Challenges and Future Directions of Data-Centric AI Alignment". TL;DR: Aligning powerful AI systems isn't just about better algorithms — it's also about better feedback data, whether
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🌍 GeoArena is live! Evaluate how well large vision-language models (LVLMs) understand the world through image geolocalization. Help us compare models via human preference — your feedback matters! 🔗 Try it now: https://t.co/x5oe9B26tu
#GeoArena #Geolocation #LVLM #AI
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🚨 If you care about reliable, low-cost LLM hallucination detection, our #ICML2025 paper offers a powerful and data-efficient solution. 💡We introduce TSV: Truthfulness Separator Vector — a single vector injected into a frozen LLM that reshapes its hidden space to better
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🚨 We’re hiring! The Radio Lab @ NTU Singapore is looking for PhD, master, undergrads, RAs, and interns to build responsible AI & LLMs. Remote/onsite from 2025. Interested? Email us: radiolab.ntu.recruiting@gmail.com 🔗 https://t.co/377UaRL9Ic Please spread the word if you can!
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Excited to join the College of Computing and Data Science at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (@NTUsg) as an Assistant Professor this fall! 🙌 Grateful to my advisor @SharonYixuanLi and all who supported me along the way. Looking forward to the new chapter! 😄 🇸🇬
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📢 Looking for new research ideas in AI alignment? Check out our new #ICML2025 position paper: "Challenges and Future Directions of Data-Centric AI Alignment". TL;DR: Aligning powerful AI systems isn't just about better algorithms — it's also about better feedback data, whether
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Excited to be in Singapore for ICLR 2025! We’ll be presenting “Your Weak LLM is Secretly a Strong Teacher for Alignment “ in Hall 3 + Hall 2B on April 24th from 3:00 p.m. If you’re interested in LLM post-training or AI safety, come by! Looking forward to meeting everyone!
Can the feedback from a 'weak' LLM with only hundreds of millions of parameters rival that from humans and GPT-4 for alignment?🤔Yes! Our study shows even a 125M weak model can match or even outperform both! 🚀 Learn more: https://t.co/kaiLXxIQgj (w. @SharonYixuanLi) Thread below
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