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Adith Swaminathan

Adith Swaminathan appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

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Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceInformation RetrievalComputation and Language

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Course Correction in Steerability Evaluation: Revealing Miscalibration and Side Effects in LLMs

Despite advances in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning and instruction-following tasks, it is unclear whether they can reliably produce outputs aligned with a variety of user goals, a concept called steerability. Two gaps in current LLM evaluation impede steerability evaluation: (1) many benchmarks are built with past LLM chats and Internet-scraped text, which may skew towards common requests, and (2) scalar measures of performance common in prior work could conceal behavioral shifts in LLM outputs in open-ended generation. Thus, we introduce a framework based on a multi-dimensional goal-space that models user goals and LLM outputs as vectors with dimensions corresponding to text attributes (e.g., reading difficulty). Applied to a text-rewriting task, we find that current LLMs induce unintended changes or side effects to text attributes, impeding steerability. Interventions to improve steerability, such as prompt engineering, best-of-N sampling, and reinforcement learning fine-tuning, have varying effectiveness but side effects remain problematic. Our findings suggest that even strong LLMs struggle with steerability, and existing alignment strategies may be insufficient. We open-source our steerability evaluation framework at https://github.com/MLD3/steerability.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

The Context Gathering Decision Process: A POMDP Framework for Agentic Search

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are deployed in complex environments -- such as massive codebases, enterprise databases, and conversational histories -- where the relevant state far exceeds their context windows. To navigate these spaces, an agent must iteratively explore the environment to find relevant information. However, without explicit infrastructure, an agent's working memory can degrade into lossy representations of the search state, resulting in redundant work (e.g. repetitive looping) and premature stopping. In this work, we formalize this challenge as the Context Gathering Decision Process (CGDP), a specialized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process, where an agent's objective is to adaptively refine its belief state to isolate the necessary information for a task. We model an LLM's behavior as approximate Thompson Sampling within this CGDP, and introduce a predicate-based method that decomposes an LLM's implicit search into explicit and modular operations. We then derive two plug-and-play interventions for iterative LLM agents: a persistent, predicate-based belief state that bounds context while preserving multi-hop reasoning, and a programmatic exhaustion gate that halts unproductive search without premature stopping. Across four methods and three question-answering domains, we empirically validate that replacing an LLM's implicit state with our CGDP-motivated belief state improves multi-hop reasoning by up to $11.4\%$; while the modular programmatic exhaustion detection saves up to $39\%$ of tokens without any degradation in agent performance. Ultimately, we argue that framing the LLM agent loop as a CGDP can guide the design of modular, non-interfering improvements to agentic search harnesses.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Learning Calibratable Policies using Programmatic Style-Consistency

We study the problem of controllable generation of long-term sequential behaviors, where the goal is to calibrate to multiple behavior styles simultaneously. In contrast to the well-studied areas of controllable generation of images, text, and speech, there are two questions that pose significant challenges when generating long-term behaviors: how should we specify the factors of variation to control, and how can we ensure that the generated behavior faithfully demonstrates combinatorially many styles? We leverage programmatic labeling functions to specify controllable styles, and derive a formal notion of style-consistency as a learning objective, which can then be solved using conventional policy learning approaches. We evaluate our framework using demonstrations from professional basketball players and agents in the MuJoCo physics environment, and show that existing approaches that do not explicitly enforce style-consistency fail to generate diverse behaviors whereas our learned policies can be calibrated for up to 1024 distinct style combinations.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Provably Good Batch Reinforcement Learning Without Great Exploration

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions outside the support of the batch data, and function approximation and optimization with limited samples can further increase the potential of learning policies with overly optimistic estimates of their future performance. Recent algorithms have shown promise but can still be overly optimistic in their expected outcomes. Theoretical work that provides strong guarantees on the performance of the output policy relies on a strong concentrability assumption, that makes it unsuitable for cases where the ratio between state-action distributions of behavior policy and some candidate policies is large. This is because in the traditional analysis, the error bound scales up with this ratio. We show that a small modification to Bellman optimality and evaluation back-up to take a more conservative update can have much stronger guarantees. In certain settings, they can find the approximately best policy within the state-action space explored by the batch data, without requiring a priori assumptions of concentrability. We highlight the necessity of our conservative update and the limitations of previous algorithms and analyses by illustrative MDP examples, and demonstrate an empirical comparison of our algorithm and other state-of-the-art batch RL baselines in standard benchmarks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Working Memory Graphs

Transformers have increasingly outperformed gated RNNs in obtaining new state-of-the-art results on supervised tasks involving text sequences. Inspired by this trend, we study the question of how Transformer-based models can improve the performance of sequential decision-making agents. We present the Working Memory Graph (WMG), an agent that employs multi-head self-attention to reason over a dynamic set of vectors representing observed and recurrent state. We evaluate WMG in three environments featuring factored observation spaces: a Pathfinding environment that requires complex reasoning over past observations, BabyAI gridworld levels that involve variable goals, and Sokoban which emphasizes future planning. We find that the combination of WMG's Transformer-based architecture with factored observation spaces leads to significant gains in learning efficiency compared to baseline architectures across all tasks. WMG demonstrates how Transformer-based models can dramatically boost sample efficiency in RL environments for which observations can be factored.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Recommendations as Treatments: Debiasing Learning and Evaluation

Most data for evaluating and training recommender systems is subject to selection biases, either through self-selection by the users or through the actions of the recommendation system itself. In this paper, we provide a principled approach to handling selection biases, adapting models and estimation techniques from causal inference. The approach leads to unbiased performance estimators despite biased data, and to a matrix factorization method that provides substantially improved prediction performance on real-world data. We theoretically and empirically characterize the robustness of the approach, finding that it is highly practical and scalable.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Unbiased Comparative Evaluation of Ranking Functions

Eliciting relevance judgments for ranking evaluation is labor-intensive and costly, motivating careful selection of which documents to judge. Unlike traditional approaches that make this selection deterministically, probabilistic sampling has shown intriguing promise since it enables the design of estimators that are provably unbiased even when reusing data with missing judgments. In this paper, we first unify and extend these sampling approaches by viewing the evaluation problem as a Monte Carlo estimation task that applies to a large number of common IR metrics. Drawing on the theoretical clarity that this view offers, we tackle three practical evaluation scenarios: comparing two systems, comparing $k$ systems against a baseline, and ranking $k$ systems. For each scenario, we derive an estimator and a variance-optimizing sampling distribution while retaining the strengths of sampling-based evaluation, including unbiasedness, reusability despite missing data, and ease of use in practice. In addition to the theoretical contribution, we empirically evaluate our methods against previously used sampling heuristics and find that they generally cut the number of required relevance judgments at least in half.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Unbiased Learning-to-Rank with Biased Feedback

Implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times, etc.) is an abundant source of data in human-interactive systems. While implicit feedback has many advantages (e.g., it is inexpensive to collect, user centric, and timely), its inherent biases are a key obstacle to its effective use. For example, position bias in search rankings strongly influences how many clicks a result receives, so that directly using click data as a training signal in Learning-to-Rank (LTR) methods yields sub-optimal results. To overcome this bias problem, we present a counterfactual inference framework that provides the theoretical basis for unbiased LTR via Empirical Risk Minimization despite biased data. Using this framework, we derive a Propensity-Weighted Ranking SVM for discriminative learning from implicit feedback, where click models take the role of the propensity estimator. In contrast to most conventional approaches to de-bias the data using click models, this allows training of ranking functions even in settings where queries do not repeat. Beyond the theoretical support, we show empirically that the proposed learning method is highly effective in dealing with biases, that it is robust to noise and propensity model misspecification, and that it scales efficiently. We also demonstrate the real-world applicability of our approach on an operational search engine, where it substantially improves retrieval performance.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2015arXiv

Counterfactual Risk Minimization: Learning from Logged Bandit Feedback

We develop a learning principle and an efficient algorithm for batch learning from logged bandit feedback. This learning setting is ubiquitous in online systems (e.g., ad placement, web search, recommendation), where an algorithm makes a prediction (e.g., ad ranking) for a given input (e.g., query) and observes bandit feedback (e.g., user clicks on presented ads). We first address the counterfactual nature of the learning problem through propensity scoring. Next, we prove generalization error bounds that account for the variance of the propensity-weighted empirical risk estimator. These constructive bounds give rise to the Counterfactual Risk Minimization (CRM) principle. We show how CRM can be used to derive a new learning method -- called Policy Optimizer for Exponential Models (POEM) -- for learning stochastic linear rules for structured output prediction. We present a decomposition of the POEM objective that enables efficient stochastic gradient optimization. POEM is evaluated on several multi-label classification problems showing substantially improved robustness and generalization performance compared to the state-of-the-art.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access