Noam Razin
Postdoctoral Fellow
Princeton Language and Intelligence, Princeton University
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton Language and Intelligence. My research focuses on the foundations of modern machine learning. I aim to develop theories that shed light on how neural networks operate, as well as bring forth principled methods for improving their efficiency, reliability, and performance. Most recently, I have been working on language model post-training.
- In [1], we identify a vanishing gradients problem that arises during reinforcement learning approaches. Building on this optimization perspective, [2] investigates what makes a good reward model.
- In [3], we characterize the causes for likelihood displacement — the counter-intuitive phenomenon where preference optimization decreases the probability of preferred responses instead of increasing it as intended. We show that likelihood displacement can lead to surprising failures in alignment and provide preventative guidelines
My work is supported in part by a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholarship. Previously, I obtained my PhD in Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, where I was fortunate to be advised by Nadav Cohen. During my PhD, I interned at Apple Machine Learning Research and the Microsoft Recommendations Team, and received the Apple Scholars in AI/ML and the Tel Aviv University Center for AI & Data Science fellowships.
Email: noamrazin (at) princeton.edu
