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Beyond maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), the standard objective of a language model (LM) that optimizes good examples probabilities, many studies have explored ways that also penalize bad examples for enhancing the quality of output…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Yi-Lin Tuan , William Yang Wang

Preference optimization has become a central paradigm for aligning large language models with human feedback. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplifies reinforcement learning from human feedback by directly optimizing pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Inoussa Mouiche

Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on web-scale datasets have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on downstream tasks when fine-tuned with minimal data. However, many VLMs rely on proprietary data and are not open-source, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Shihong Liu , Zhiqiu Lin , Samuel Yu , Ryan Lee , Tiffany Ling , Deepak Pathak , Deva Ramanan

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become a crucial step for aligning pretrained large language models (LLMs) using supervised datasets of input-output pairs. However, despite being supervised, SFT is inherently limited by its generative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Siqi Guo , Ilgee Hong , Vicente Balmaseda , Changlong Yu , Liang Qiu , Xin Liu , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao , Tianbao Yang

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Miguel Moura Ramos , Duarte M. Alves , André F. T. Martins

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. Typically, LLMs are first pre-trained on large corpora and subsequently fine-tuned on task-specific datasets. However, during fine-tuning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yupeng Chen , Senmiao Wang , Yushun Zhang , Zhihang Lin , Haozhe Zhang , Weijian Sun , Tian Ding , Ruoyu Sun

Optimizing black-box functions is a fundamental problem in science and engineering. To solve this problem, many approaches learn a surrogate function that estimates the underlying objective from limited historical evaluations. Large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Tung Nguyen , Aditya Grover

Prompt-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) paradigm have succeeded substantially in few-shot natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, prior discrete prompt optimization methods require expert knowledge to design the base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Chengzhengxu Li , Xiaoming Liu , Yichen Wang , Duyi Li , Yu Lan , Chao Shen

Traditional approaches to portfolio optimization, often rooted in Modern Portfolio Theory and solved via quadratic programming or evolutionary algorithms, struggle with scalability or flexibility, especially in scenarios involving complex…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Christian Oliva , Pedro R. Ventura , Luis F. Lago-Fernández

Prompt learning is an effective way to exploit the potential of large-scale pre-trained foundational models. Continuous prompts parameterize context tokens in prompts by turning them into differentiable vectors. Deep continuous prompts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Zhenhan Huang , Tejaswini Pedapati , Pin-Yu Chen , Jianxi Gao

Motivated by the problem of tuning hyperparameters in machine learning, we present a new approach for gradually and adaptively optimizing an unknown function using estimated gradients. We validate the empirical performance of the proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Weijia Shao , Christian Geißler , Fikret Sivrikaya

This study evaluates Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, testing three configurations: (1) with Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), (2) without SFT, and (3)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Md Nayem Uddin , Chitta Baral

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have emerged as powerful generative models with the promise of fast text generation through parallel decoding. However, realizing this potential in practice remains challenging: reducing the number of…

In this paper, we propose the StepDIRECT algorithm for derivative-free optimization (DFO), in which the black-box objective function has a stepwise landscape. Our framework is based on the well-known DIRECT algorithm. By incorporating the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-03 Dzung T. Phan , Hongsheng Liu , Lam M. Nguyen

Traditional RLHF-based LLM alignment methods explicitly maximize the expected rewards from a separate reward model. More recent supervised alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) circumvent this phase to avoid problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Abhijnan Nath , Changsoo Jung , Ethan Seefried , Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become pivotal in advancing natural language processing, yet their potential to perpetuate biases poses significant concerns. This paper introduces a new framework employing Direct Preference Optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Ahmed Allam

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in natural language processing tasks, but their application to machine translation (MT) remains challenging due to pretraining on English-centric data and the complexity of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Guofeng Cui , Pichao Wang , Yang Liu , Zemian Ke , Zhu Liu , Vimal Bhat

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 have demonstrated a strong capability to generate coherent and contextually relevant text. However, amidst their successes, a crucial issue persists: their generated outputs still lack commonsense…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Yufei Tian , Felix Zhang , Nanyun Peng

Aligning the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences (e.g., by means of reinforcement learning with human feedback, or RLHF) is essential for ensuring their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Despite significant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Pietro Bernardelle , Gianluca Demartini

For aligning large language models (LLMs), prior work has leveraged reinforcement learning via human feedback (RLHF) or variations of direct preference optimization (DPO). While DPO offers a simpler framework based on maximum likelihood…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Anirudhan Badrinath , Prabhat Agarwal , Jiajing Xu