arXiv subjects

Khushi Bhardwaj

Publications and source records attributed to Khushi Bhardwaj.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Before They Can Solve: Predicting Post-Training Coding-Agent Performance from Base Models

How can we predict which base checkpoint is worth an expensive round of agentic post-training? End-to-end pass@$K$ tests whether successful behavior already appears in a base model's distribution, but it is a poor fit for agentic coding: many base checkpoints cannot reliably produce the well-formed tool invocation required to complete a task end-to-end. Single-shot or short-horizon tasks avoid these tool-calling failures by collapsing a multi-step interaction into a fixed prompt and a single patch, but they sidestep the core capability we care about: maintaining coherent state over many tool-using steps as the repository evolves. To bridge this gap, we treat successful post-trained agent trajectories as a lookahead signal of base-model potential. Replaying each trajectory and rerunning tests after every code-changing step identifies the decisive step: the first step whose cumulative patch flips the repository from failing to passing, certifying that the recorded action solves the task given the prior context. Motivated by a coverage principle for agentic traces, we build three screens at this step that do not require a base checkpoint to drive the harness from a cold start: (i) Decisive-Action BPB (bits per byte) measures the probability mass on the certified action, (ii) Patch MCQ tests the checkpoint's choice between that action and alternatives rejected by the same verifier, and (iii) prefix-conditioned pass@$K$ evaluates support for functionally-correct generations and credits any continuation that the tests accept. Across ten pairs of public base and post-trained models, all three screens rank the cohort in close agreement with post-trained SWE-bench Verified pass@$1$. As our methods need only a benchmark's successful trajectories and its verifier, they can be applied to turn future agentic coding benchmarks into base-model evaluations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

PivotOPD: Learning to Recover from Pivotal Mistakes in Multi-Turn Agents

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a promising approach for training language agents, providing dense teacher supervision on student-generated trajectories. However, in multi-turn interaction, an incorrect action changes the states the student encounters later, so errors compound across turns. In preliminary experiments across three Qwen3 models (8B to 235B), we find that more than half of the failed rollouts contain a pivotal mistake, an action that moves the agent farther from completing the task, and this mistake typically occurs early. These pivotal mistakes often remain recoverable: guiding the model for only a few turns after the pivotal turn can restore task success. We therefore propose PivotOPD, an on-policy distillation framework that jointly trains the student to prevent pivotal mistakes and to recover from the states they create. At each pivotal mistake, a teacher model provides a gold action and then names a recovery action at each of the next few turns. Preventive distillation uses the gold action with reverse KL to steer the student away from the pivotal mistake, while recovery distillation uses the recovery actions with forward KL to transfer recovery behaviors that the student rarely samples. Against 13 baselines on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-based QA, PivotOPD achieves the strongest average performance for both Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-8B students, improving over the strongest baseline on ALFWorld by +5.5% with the 1.7B student. The gains also transfer to another model family on the software engineering domain, where PivotOPD raises the resolve rate of a Nemotron-3.5 student on SWE-Bench Verified by +3.2%. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/pivotopd/

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Coresets Before Score Sets: Evaluation-Unsupervised Prompt Subset Selection for LLM Benchmarks

We study LLM benchmark coreset selection: selecting a small subset of prompts over multiple benchmarks whose induced model scores and rankings approximate those obtained from the full benchmark suite. In evaluation-unsupervised benchmark coreset selection (our approach), the selection algorithm uses no model evaluation outcomes, and operates on a fine granularity by producing subsets of prompts over multiple benchmarks rather than producing a sub-collection of entire benchmarks. We use submodular subset selection, and we develop and evaluate many different submodular functions for this purpose, including determinantal point process (DPP) based approaches, submodular mutual information functions, and facility location-based functions. On a new large-scale suite of 35 heterogeneous benchmarks spanning five different capability categories, 18 frontier LLMs, and over 61K prompts, we find that the facility location (FL) function operating exclusively on inexpensive semantic prompt embeddings preserves LLM scores better than twelve separate score-based and diversity-based baselines, across a range of coreset budgets. Moreover, we show our proposed objective is not limited to the evaluation-unsupervised regime: in the setting where only a handful of whole benchmarks must be selected and a large amount of model scores are available, the same objective matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on the MMLU and MTEB leaderboards, while being substantially cheaper to compute. Together, our results suggest that submodularity, in general, is a strong and reliable tool for benchmark compression.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

PivotRL: High Accuracy Agentic Post-Training at Low Compute Cost

Post-training for long-horizon agentic tasks has a tension between compute efficiency and generalization. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is compute efficient, it often suffers from out-of-domain (OOD) degradation. Conversely, end-to-end reinforcement learning (E2E RL) preserves OOD capabilities, but incurs high compute costs due to many turns of on-policy rollout. We introduce PivotRL, a novel framework that operates on existing SFT trajectories to combine the compute efficiency of SFT with the OOD accuracy of E2E RL. PivotRL relies on two key mechanisms: first, it executes local, on-policy rollouts and filters for pivots: informative intermediate turns where sampled actions exhibit high variance in outcomes; second, it utilizes rewards for functional-equivalent actions rather than demanding strict string matching with the SFT data demonstration. We theoretically show that these mechanisms incentivize strong learning signals with high natural gradient norm, while maximally preserving policy probability ordering on actions unrelated to training tasks. In comparison to standard SFT on identical data, we demonstrate that PivotRL achieves +4.17% higher in-domain accuracy on average across four agentic domains, and +10.04% higher OOD accuracy in non-agentic tasks. Notably, on agentic coding tasks, PivotRL achieves competitive accuracy with E2E RL with 4x fewer rollout turns. PivotRL is adopted by NVIDIA's Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B, acting as the workhorse in production-scale agentic post-training.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Development of Cognitive Intelligence in Pre-trained Language Models

Recent studies show evidence for emergent cognitive abilities in Large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). The increasing cognitive alignment of these models has made them candidates for cognitive science theories. Prior research into the emergent cognitive abilities of PLMs has largely been path-independent to model training, i.e., has focused on the final model weights and not the intermediate steps. However, building plausible models of human cognition using PLMs would benefit from considering the developmental alignment of their performance during training to the trajectories of children's thinking. Guided by psychometric tests of human intelligence, we choose four sets of tasks to investigate the alignment of ten popular families of PLMs and evaluate their available intermediate and final training steps. These tasks are Numerical ability, Linguistic abilities, Conceptual understanding, and Fluid reasoning. We find a striking regularity: regardless of model size, the developmental trajectories of PLMs consistently exhibit a window of maximal alignment to human cognitive development. Before that window, training appears to endow "blank slate" models with the requisite structure to be poised to rapidly learn from experience. After that window, training appears to serve the engineering goal of reducing loss but not the scientific goal of increasing alignment with human cognition.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Pre-training LLMs using human-like development data corpus

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown success in a diverse set of language inference and understanding tasks. The pre-training stage of LLMs looks at a large corpus of raw textual data. The BabyLM shared task compares LLM pre-training to human language acquisition, where the number of tokens seen by 13-year-old kids is magnitudes smaller than the number of tokens seen by LLMs. In this work, we pre-train and evaluate LLMs on their ability to learn contextual word representations using roughly the same number of tokens as seen by children. We provide a strong set of baselines; with different architectures, evaluation of changes in performance across epochs, and reported pre-training metrics for the strict small and strict tracks of the task. We also try to loosely replicate the RoBERTa baseline given by the task organizers to observe the training robustness to hyperparameter selection and replicability. We provide the submission details to the strict and strict-small tracks in this report.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Human Behavioral Benchmarking: Numeric Magnitude Comparison Effects in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) do not differentially represent numbers, which are pervasive in text. In contrast, neuroscience research has identified distinct neural representations for numbers and words. In this work, we investigate how well popular LLMs capture the magnitudes of numbers (e.g., that $4 < 5$) from a behavioral lens. Prior research on the representational capabilities of LLMs evaluates whether they show human-level performance, for instance, high overall accuracy on standard benchmarks. Here, we ask a different question, one inspired by cognitive science: How closely do the number representations of LLMscorrespond to those of human language users, who typically demonstrate the distance, size, and ratio effects? We depend on a linking hypothesis to map the similarities among the model embeddings of number words and digits to human response times. The results reveal surprisingly human-like representations across language models of different architectures, despite the absence of the neural circuitry that directly supports these representations in the human brain. This research shows the utility of understanding LLMs using behavioral benchmarks and points the way to future work on the number representations of LLMs and their cognitive plausibility.

cs.AI↗