Related papers: Just Train Twice: Improving Group Robustness witho…
We study the problem of learning a single neuron under standard squared loss in the presence of arbitrary label noise and group-level distributional shifts, for a broad family of covariate distributions. Our goal is to identify a…
Recent studies show that deep neural networks (DNN) are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which aim to mislead DNNs by adding perturbations with small magnitude. To defend against such attacks, both empirical and theoretical defense…
Large language models are typically post-trained using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), yet effectively unifying efficient knowledge injection with robust generalization remains challenging. In this work, we…
This work, based on Random Matrix Theory (RMT), introduces a novel early-stopping strategy for Transformer training dynamics. Utilizing the Power Law (PL) fit to tansformer attention matrices as a probe, we demarcate training into three…
Deep neural networks often rely on spurious features to make predictions, which makes them brittle under distribution shift and on samples where the spurious correlation does not hold (e.g., minority-group examples). Recent studies have…
Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown rapid improvements in reasoning capabilities, driven largely by reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards. Here, we ask whether these LLMs can self-improve without the need for…
We propose a hybrid approach aimed at improving the sample efficiency in goal-directed reinforcement learning. We do this via a two-step mechanism where firstly, we approximate a model from Model-Free reinforcement learning. Then, we…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly boosted the reasoning capability of language models (LMs). However, existing RLVR approaches train LMs based on their own on-policy responses and are constrained by the…
Deep neural networks often exploit *spurious* features that are present in the majority of examples within a class during training. This leads to *poor worst-group test accuracy*, i.e., poor accuracy for minority groups that lack these…
Knowledge Tracing (KT) is fundamental to intelligent education systems, yet relies on educational logs that are selectively observed. The non-random nature of exercise recommendations and student choices inevitably induces severe selection…
We study the problem of learning classifiers that perform well across (known or unknown) groups of data. After observing that common worst-group-accuracy datasets suffer from substantial imbalances, we set out to compare state-of-the-art…
Group distributionally robust optimization, which aims to improve robust accuracies -- worst-group and unbiased accuracies -- is a prominent algorithm used to mitigate spurious correlations and address dataset bias. Although existing…
Meta-learning is a general approach to equip machine learning models with the ability to handle few-shot scenarios when dealing with many tasks. Most existing meta-learning methods work based on the assumption that all tasks are of equal…
Deep learning models in recommender systems are usually trained in the batch mode, namely iteratively trained on a fixed-size window of training data. Such batch mode training of deep learning models suffers from low training efficiency,…
Obtaining accurate class labels is often costly or unreliable, and may also be limited by privacy or other practical conditions. Compared with asking an annotator to provide the exact class, it is often easier to ask whether the true label…
This work considers the problem of binary classification: given training data $x_1, \dots, x_n$ from a certain population, together with associated labels $y_1,\dots, y_n \in \left\{0,1 \right\}$, determine the best label for an element $x$…
Environment annotations are essential for the success of many out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization methods. Unfortunately, these are costly to obtain and often limited by human annotators' biases. To achieve robust generalization, it is…
Shortcut mitigation strategies commonly rely on training data annotations, group-balanced held-out data or the presence of all groups, i.e., all combinations of (spurious) attributes and classes, in the training data. However, these…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning (RL) based post-training methods. While longer reasoning traces can improve…
Entropy minimization (EM) trains the model to concentrate even more probability mass on its most confident outputs. We show that this simple objective alone, without any labeled data, can substantially improve large language models' (LLMs)…