Alvin Zhang

Arda Uzunoglu, Alvin Zhang, Daniel Khashabi

Weak-to-strong generalization studies how to improve a strong student using supervision from a weaker teacher when reliable labels are scarce. We view this primarily as a data selection problem, where the key challenge is to identify which weak labels are reliable enough to serve as a training signal. To address this, we introduce trust functions that assign each weak label a scalar trust score and use these scores to filter weak supervision. Across several domains, including world knowledge, quantitative reasoning, and strategy games, trust filtering yields students that match and sometimes surpass ground-truth supervision, achieving near-lossless weak-to-strong generalization. Moreover, trust functions enable an iterative weak-to-strong chain that compounds gains by training a student and reusing it as the next teacher, amplifying the gains. There are several mechanisms to which advantage of trust functions can be attributed.

Xi Wang, Anushri Suresh, Alvin Zhang et al.

Reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) enable test-time scaling, with dataset-level accuracy improving as the token budget increases, motivating adaptive reasoning -- spending tokens when they improve reliability and stopping early when additional computation is unlikely to help. However, setting the token budget, as well as the threshold for adaptive reasoning, is a practical challenge that entails a fundamental risk-accuracy trade-off. We re-frame the budget setting problem as risk control, limiting the error rate while minimizing compute. Our framework introduces an upper threshold that stops reasoning when the model is confident (risking incorrect output) and a novel parametric lower threshold that preemptively stops unsolvable instances (risking premature stoppage). Given a target risk and a validation set, we use distribution-free risk control to optimally specify these stopping mechanisms. For scenarios with multiple budget controlling criteria, we incorporate an efficiency loss to select the most computationally efficient exiting mechanism. Empirical results across diverse reasoning tasks and models demonstrate the effectiveness of our risk control approach, demonstrating computational efficiency gains from the lower threshold and ensemble stopping mechanisms while adhering to the user-specified risk target.

Dongwei Jiang, Alvin Zhang, Andrew Wang et al.

Recent studies have shown LLMs possess some ability to improve their responses when given external feedback. However, it remains unclear how effectively and thoroughly these models can incorporate extrinsic feedback. In an ideal scenario, if LLMs receive near-perfect and complete feedback, we would expect them to fully integrate the feedback and reach correct solutions. In this paper, we systematically investigate LLMs' ability to incorporate feedback by designing a controlled experimental environment. For each problem, a solver model attempts a solution, then a feedback generator with access to near-complete ground-truth answers produces targeted feedback, after which the solver tries again. We evaluate this pipeline across a diverse range of tasks, including math reasoning, knowledge reasoning, scientific reasoning, and general multi-domain evaluations with state-of-the-art language models including Claude 3.7 with extended thinking. Surprisingly, even under these near-ideal conditions, solver models consistently show resistance to feedback, a limitation that we term Feedback Friction. To mitigate this limitation, we experiment with sampling-based strategies like progressive temperature increases and explicit rejection of previously attempted incorrect answers, which yield improvements but still fail to help models achieve target performance. We analyze Feedback Friction and find that models' confidence on specific questions, measured by semantic entropy, predicts feedback resistance: high-confidence predictions remain resistant to external correction. We hope that highlighting this issue in LLMs will help future research in self-improvement.