author

Fred Sala

Chief Scientist
,
Snorkel AI
Assistant Professor @ University of Wisconsin-Madison

Frederic Sala is Chief Scientist at Snorkel AI and an assistant professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research studies the fundamentals of data-driven systems and machine learning, with a focus on data-centric AI, foundation models, and automated machine learning. He and his group received the 2024 DARPA Young Faculty Award, a best student paper runner-up award at UAI ’22, the outstanding Ph.D. dissertation award from the UCLA Department of Electrical Engineering, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

The latest from Fred

OSWorld 2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Tasks
Existing computer-use benchmarks fail to capture the realism, complexity, and long-horizon demands of real-world computer use, limiting their ability to reveal the limita-tions of frontier agents. We introduce OSWORLD 2.0, a benchmark of 108 long-horizoncomputer-use workflows across everyday and professional tasks, designed to capturecomplex and challenging real-world phenomena. Each task represents a realistic end-to-end workflow that takes human users a median of about 1.6 hours to complete andrequires an average of 318 tool calls with Claude Opus 4.7 using maximum thinking,compared with about 30 in OSWORLD 1.0. OSWORLD 2.0 targets challenge phenomenathat are common in real workflows yet underrepresented in...
Research Paper
OSWorld 2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Tasks

Existing computer-use benchmarks fail to capture the realism, complexity, and long-horizon demands of real-world computer use, limiting their ability to reveal the limita-tions of frontier agents. We introduce OSWORLD 2.0, a benchmark of 108 long-horizoncomputer-use workflows across everyday and professional tasks, designed to capturecomplex and challenging real-world phenomena. Each task represents a realistic end-to-end workflow that takes human users a…

Jun 26, 2026

XLANG Lab and contributions from Snorkel AI’s Zhengyang Qi, Vincent Sunn Chen, and Frederic Sala

Learn more about OSWorld 2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Tasks
Can Generalist Agents Automate Data Curation?
Curating training data is among the most consequential yet labor-intensive parts of modern AI development: practitioners iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, and revise data policies against noisy benchmark feedback. We ask whether generalist coding agents can automate this data-curation loop. We introduce CURATION-BENCH, an agent-centric benchmark that fixes the model, training recipe, and evaluation suite while giving agents commandline access to inspect data, implement policies, submit them to a fixed training/evaluation pipeline, and revise. In a vision-language instruction-tuning instantiation, out-of-the-box agents reach strong published data-selection baselines within ten iterations. However, trajectory analysis reveals a persistent execution– research gap: agents mainly tune...
Research Paper
Can Generalist Agents Automate Data Curation?

Curating training data is among the most consequential yet labor-intensive parts of modern AI development: practitioners iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, and revise data policies against noisy benchmark feedback. We ask whether generalist coding agents can automate this data-curation loop. We introduce CURATION-BENCH, an agent-centric benchmark that fixes the model, training recipe, and evaluation suite while giving agents commandline access to…

Jun 09, 2026

Feiyang Kang, Hanze Li, Adam Nguyen, Mahavir Dabas, Jiaqi W. Ma , Frederic Sala, Dawn Song, Ruoxi Jia

Learn more about Can Generalist Agents Automate Data Curation?
Learning from Less: Measuring the Effectiveness of RLVR in Low Data and Compute Regimes
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on large quantities of high-quality annotated data, or questions with well-defined ground truth answers in the case of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). While previous work has explored the benefits to model reasoning capabilities by scaling both data and compute used for RLVR, these results lack applicability in many real-world settings where annotated data and accessible compute may be scarce. In this work, we present a comprehensive empirical study of open-source Small Language Model (SLM) performance after RLVR in low data regimes. Across three novel datasets covering number counting problems, graph reasoning,...
Research Paper
Accepted to MLSys 2026
Learning from Less: Measuring the Effectiveness of RLVR in Low Data and Compute Regimes

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on large quantities of high-quality annotated data, or questions with well-defined ground truth answers in the case of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). While previous work has explored the benefits to model reasoning capabilities by scaling both data and compute used for RLVR, these results lack applicability in many real-world settings where…

Apr 21, 2026

Justin Bauer, Thomas Walshe, Derek Pham, Harit Vishwakarma, Armin Parchami, Frederic Sala, Paroma Varma

Learn more about Learning from Less: Measuring the Effectiveness of RLVR in Low Data and Compute Regimes
RIFT: A Rubric Failure Mode Taxonomy and Automated Diagnostics
Rubric-based evaluation is widely used in LLM benchmarks and training pipelines for open-ended, less verifiable tasks. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of rubrics using downstream signals such as reinforcement learning outcomes, there remains no principled way to diagnose rubric quality issues from such aggregated or downstream signals alone. To address this gap, we introduce RIFT: RubrIc Failure mode Taxonomy, a taxonomy for systematically characterizing failure modes in rubric composition and design. RIFT consists of eight failure modes organized into three high-level categories: Reliability Failures, Content Validity Failures, and Consequential Validity Failures. RIFT is developed using grounded theory by...
Research Paper
Accepted to ICLR Brazil 2026
RIFT: A Rubric Failure Mode Taxonomy and Automated Diagnostics

Rubric-based evaluation is widely used in LLM benchmarks and training pipelines for open-ended, less verifiable tasks. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of rubrics using downstream signals such as reinforcement learning outcomes, there remains no principled way to diagnose rubric quality issues from such aggregated or downstream signals alone. To address this gap, we introduce RIFT: RubrIc Failure mode…

Learn more about RIFT: A Rubric Failure Mode Taxonomy and Automated Diagnostics
A chat with the Terminal-Bench team
Blog
A chat with the Terminal-Bench team

Snorkel Chief Scientist Fred Sala and Kobie Crawford chat with the Terminal-Bench team to unpack the design behind Terminal-Bench 2.0 and the new Harbor framework.

Nov 19, 2025
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Beyond accuracy: Dissecting mathematical reasoning for LLMs under reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the performance of language models on complex reasoning tasks. Despite the substantial empirical gains demonstrated by RL-based training methods like GRPO, a granular understanding of why and how RL enhances performance is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we introduce SPARKLE, a fine-grained analytic framework to dissect the effects of RL across three key dimensions: (1) plan following and execution, (2) knowledge integration, and (3) chain of subproblems. Using this framework, we gain insights beyond mere accuracy. For instance, providing models with explicit human-crafted, step-by-step plans can surprisingly degrade performance...
Research Paper
Beyond accuracy: Dissecting mathematical reasoning for LLMs under reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the performance of language models on complex reasoning tasks. Despite the substantial empirical gains demonstrated by RL-based training methods like GRPO, a granular understanding of why and how RL enhances performance is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we introduce SPARKLE, a fine-grained analytic framework to dissect the effects of…

Nov 17, 2025

Jiayu Wang, Yifei Ming, Zixuan Ke, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty, Aws Albarghouthi, Frederic Sala

Learn more about Beyond accuracy: Dissecting mathematical reasoning for LLMs under reinforcement learning
Automating benchmark design
The rapid progress and widespread deployment of LLMs and LLM-powered agents has outpaced our ability to evaluate them. Hand-crafted, static benchmarks are the primary tool for assessing model capabilities, but these quickly become saturated. In contrast, dynamic benchmarks evolve alongside the models they evaluate, but are expensive to create and continuously update. To address these challenges, we develop BeTaL (Benchmark Tuning with an LLM-in-the-loop), a framework that leverages environment design principles to automate the process of dynamic benchmark design. BeTaL works by parameterizing key design choices in base benchmark templates and uses LLMs to reason through the resulting parameter space...
Research Paper
Automating benchmark design

The rapid progress and widespread deployment of LLMs and LLM-powered agents has outpaced our ability to evaluate them. Hand-crafted, static benchmarks are the primary tool for assessing model capabilities, but these quickly become saturated. In contrast, dynamic benchmarks evolve alongside the models they evaluate, but are expensive to create and continuously update. To address these challenges, we develop BeTaL (Benchmark…

Oct 30, 2025

Amanda Dsouza, Harit Vishwakarma, Zhengyang Qi, Justin Bauer, Derek Pham, Thomas Walshe, Armin Parchami, Frederic Sala, Paroma Varma

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Reference-specific unlearning metrics can hide the truth: A reality check
Evaluating the effectiveness of unlearning in large language models (LLMs) remains a key challenge, especially as existing metrics often rely on specific reference outputs. The widely used forget quality metric from the TOFU benchmark compares likelihoods over paraphrased answers but is highly sensitive to the choice of the reference answers, potentially obscuring whether a model has truly forgotten the targeted information. We argue that unlearning should instead be assessed via distributional equivalence---how closely an unlearned model aligns functionally with the retain-only model. To this end, we propose Functional Alignment for Distributional Equivalence (FADE), a novel distribution-level metric that compares two distributions of textual...
Research Paper
Reference-specific unlearning metrics can hide the truth: A reality check

Evaluating the effectiveness of unlearning in large language models (LLMs) remains a key challenge, especially as existing metrics often rely on specific reference outputs. The widely used forget quality metric from the TOFU benchmark compares likelihoods over paraphrased answers but is highly sensitive to the choice of the reference answers, potentially obscuring whether a model has truly forgotten the targeted information. We…

Sep 23, 2025

Sungjun Cho, Dasol Hwang, Frederic Sala, Sangheum Hwang, Kyunghyun Cho, Sungmin Cha

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From many voices to one: Statistically principled aggregation of LLM judges
LLM-as-a-judge---often with multiple judges---is now the standard for scalable model evaluation, yet judge biases and correlations can amplify errors. We cast aggregation as inference in a latent-factor Markov random field that jointly models a latent true-quality variable, inter-judge correlations, and confounders (e.g., generation length). We address two key technical challenges---identifiability and learning a higher-rank latent structure---via CARE, a two-stage estimator that uses sparse+low-rank structure recovery and tensor decomposition to separate quality from spurious factors. This enables us to better understand the quality and behavior of judges, leading to improved evaluation capabilities. Empirically, it reduces aggregation error by up to 25.15% and seamlessly incorporates...
Research Paper
From many voices to one: Statistically principled aggregation of LLM judges

LLM-as-a-judge—often with multiple judges—is now the standard for scalable model evaluation, yet judge biases and correlations can amplify errors. We cast aggregation as inference in a latent-factor Markov random field that jointly models a latent true-quality variable, inter-judge correlations, and confounders (e.g., generation length). We address two key technical challenges—identifiability and learning a higher-rank latent structure—via CARE, a two-stage estimator that…

Sep 23, 2025

Jitian Zhao, Changho Shin, Tzu-Heng Huang, Satya Sai Srinath Namburi GNVV, Frederic Sala

Learn more about From many voices to one: Statistically principled aggregation of LLM judges
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For models that need to be right. Not just good enough.