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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become the de facto standards for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences or specific goals. However, DPO requires high-quality preference data and suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Zhuotong Chen , Fang Liu , Jennifer Zhu , Wanyu Du , Yanjun Qi

As large language models (LLMs) advance their capabilities, aligning these models with human preferences has become crucial. Preference optimization, which trains models to distinguish between preferred and non-preferred responses based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Shawn Im , Sharon Li

Language Models (LMs) exhibit two distinct mechanisms for knowledge acquisition: in-weights learning (i.e., encoding information within the model weights) and in-context learning (ICL). Although these two modes offer complementary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Arslan Chaudhry , Sridhar Thiagarajan , Andrew Lampinen

As the complexity of neural network models has grown, it has become increasingly important to optimize their design automatically through metalearning. Methods for discovering hyperparameters, topologies, and learning rate schedules have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Santiago Gonzalez , Risto Miikkulainen

A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes. We revisit this claim for reasoning SFT with long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision and find that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Qihan Ren , Peng Wang , Ruikun Cai , Shuai Shao , Dadi Guo , Yuejin Xie , Yafu Li , Quanshi Zhang , Xia Hu , Jing Shao , Dongrui Liu

Models trained in federated settings often suffer from degraded performances and fail at generalizing, especially when facing heterogeneous scenarios. In this work, we investigate such behavior through the lens of geometry of the loss and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Debora Caldarola , Barbara Caputo , Marco Ciccone

The adversarial subproblem in two-stage adaptive robust optimization (ARO), which identifies the worst-case uncertainty realization, is a major computational bottleneck. This difficulty is exacerbated when the recourse value function is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-25 Zhiyi Zhou , Ján Drgoňa , Yury Dvorkin

It is widely observed that deep learning models with learned parameters generalize well, even with much more model parameters than the number of training samples. We systematically investigate the underlying reasons why deep neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-29 Lei Wu , Zhanxing Zhu , Weinan E

(Stochastic) bilevel optimization is a frequently encountered problem in machine learning with a wide range of applications such as meta-learning, hyper-parameter optimization, and reinforcement learning. Most of the existing studies on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Meng Ding , Mingxi Lei , Yunwen Lei , Di Wang , Jinhui Xu

Supervised learning (SL) and reinforcement learning (RL) are both widely used to train general-purpose agents for complex tasks, yet their generalization capabilities and underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Meng Song

Deep learning have achieved promising results on a wide spectrum of AI applications. Larger datasets and models consistently yield better performance. However, we generally spend longer training time on more computation and communication.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Xiaoxin He , Fuzhao Xue , Xiaozhe Ren , Yang You

To attain the best learning accuracy, people move on with difficulties and frustrations. Though one can optimize the empirical objective using a given set of samples, its generalization ability to the entire sample distribution remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-12-21 Zeyuan Allen Zhu

Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs), such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) and Identity Preference Optimisation (IPO), have emerged as alternatives to online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) algorithms such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Zhengyan Shi , Sander Land , Acyr Locatelli , Matthieu Geist , Max Bartolo

Bayesian optimization has been challenged by datasets with large-scale, high-dimensional, and non-stationary characteristics, which are common in real-world scenarios. Recent works attempt to handle such input by applying neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Fengxue Zhang , Brian Nord , Yuxin Chen

Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where a fraction of the training data is manipulated to deliberately degrade the algorithms' performance. Optimal poisoning attacks, which can be formulated as bilevel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Javier Carnerero-Cano , Luis Muñoz-González , Phillippa Spencer , Emil C. Lupu

Adversarial training has emerged as a highly effective way to improve the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs). It is typically conceptualized as a min-max optimization problem over model weights and adversarial perturbations, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Gaojie Jin , Xinping Yi , Wei Huang , Sven Schewe , Xiaowei Huang

Multi-task learning (MTL) has achieved great success in various research domains, such as CV, NLP and IR etc. Due to the complex and competing task correlation, naive training all tasks may lead to inequitable learning, i.e. some tasks are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Jun Yuan , Rui Zhang

Grokking, the abrupt transition from memorization to generalisation after extended training, suggests the presence of competing solution basins with distinct statistical properties. We study this phenomenon through the lens of Singular…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Ben Cullen , Sergio Estan-Ruiz , Riya Danait , Jiayi Li

Many learning algorithms can be represented as Markov processes, and understanding their generalization error is a central topic in learning theory. For specific continuous-time noisy algorithms, a prominent analysis technique relies on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-06 Benjamin Dupuis , Maxime Haddouche , George Deligiannidis , Umut Simsekli

We propose a simple but effective multi-source domain generalization technique based on deep neural networks by incorporating optimized normalization layers that are specific to individual domains. Our approach employs multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-22 Seonguk Seo , Yumin Suh , Dongwan Kim , Geeho Kim , Jongwoo Han , Bohyung Han