About

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Hi, I'm Evan. I am an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) master's student at UC Berkeley, advised by Professor Jiantao Jiao. I also completed my bachelor's degree in computer science at Berkeley.


My research focuses on Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) for fine-tuning LLMs. Currently, much of my efforts revolve around reward model training and benchmarking.


I am also a Research Engineer at Nexusflow, where I work on training LLMs like Athene-70B. I also work with Chatbot Arena, mainly on modeling human preferences and building LLM/RM benchmarks.

Select Publications

Prompt-to-Leaderboard [Preprint]

Evan Frick*, Connor Chen*, Joseph Tennyson*, Tianle Li*, Wei-Lin Chiang*, Anastasios N. Angelopoulos*, and Ion Stoica. (2024).


How to Evaluate Reward Models for RLHF [ICLR 2025]

Evan Frick, Tianle Li, Connor Chen, Wei-Lin Chiang, Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Jiantao Jiao, Banghua Zhu, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ion Stoica. (2024).


Starling-7B: Improving Helpfulness and Harmlessness with RLAIF. [COLM Spotlight]

Banghua Zhu*, Evan Frick*, Tianhao Wu*, Hanlin Zhu, Karthik Ganesan, Wei-Lin Chiang, Jian Zhang, and Jiantao Jiao. (2024).


From Crowdsourced Data to High-Quality Benchmarks: Arena-Hard and BenchBuilder Pipeline.

Tianle Li*, Wei-Lin Chiang*, Evan Frick, Lisa Dunlap, Tianhao Wu, Banghua Zhu, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ion Stoica. (2024).


Athene-70B: Redefining the Boundaries of Post-Training for Open Models.

Evan Frick*, Peter Jin*, Tianle Li*, Karthik Ganesan, Jian Zhang, Jiantao Jiao, and Banghua Zhu. (2024).

Experience

Sky Lab | Researcher | Apr 24 - Present | Part-time

Working on Chatbot Arena and model evaluations.


Nexusflow | Machine Learning Engineer | Nov 23 - Present | Full-time

Improving chat models with RLHF. Training enterprise grade function calling LLMs.


Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research | Researcher | Aug 23 - Present | Part-time

Making LLMs better with RLHF. Advised by Professor Jiantao Jiao.


Microsoft | Software Engineer Intern | May 23 - Aug 23 | Full-time

Worked on an all-encompassing environment-level change tracking and analytics system.


UC Berkeley CDSS | Undergraduate Researcher| Jan 23 - May 23 | Part-time

Researched Vision Transformer robustness in the dermatology domain.


Microsoft | Software Engineer Intern | May 22 - Aug 22 | Full-time

Worked on secure server allocation systems for a 10,000 server build environment.


Chess.com | Software Intern | Jun 21 - Aug 21 | Full-time

Made buttons button, clicks click, and moves move.

Education

UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | 2024 - Present

M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.


UC Berkeley Computing, Data Science, and Society | 2020 - 2024

B.A. in Computer Science, Minor in Data Science, Highest Distinction in General Scholarship.

Contact

Email: evanfrick[at]berkeley[dot]edu

Google Scholar: Evan Frick

LinkedIn: Evan Frick

Twitter: @evan_a_frick