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Johann Lee

MLE
johannl@stanford.edu

On My Mind

Publications

  1. Image ICLR
    ICLR 2026 (International Conference on Learning Representations)

    RL post-training has considerable limitations: human-annotated datasets are expensive, and LLM-generated data lacks reliable verification. We show that RL fine-tuning on rule-generated synthetic data can induce knowledge composition. This skill transfers to real-world question-answering benchmarks, significantly improving performance for reasoning across multiple logical steps.

  2. Image ICML
    ICML 2025 (International Conference on Machine Learning)

    We adresses evaluation datasets getting scraped into pretraining data with a pipeline for generating synthetic datasets (for reasoning and retrieval evaluation). We demonstrate its scraping resilience, and use it to identify improvements in RAG and agentic methods: subtask composition, multi-branch reasoning, and needle-in-a-haystack retrieval.