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Despite significant advances in long-context reasoning by large language models (LLMs), primarily through Online Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, these approaches incur substantial computational costs and complexity. In contrast,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Xiaoyu Tian , Sitong Zhao , Haotian Wang , Shuaiting Chen , Yiping Peng , Yunjie Ji , Han Zhao , Xiangang Li

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is commonly achieved through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplified this paradigm by establishing a direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Yuandong Tan

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned with human preferences through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Among RLHF methods, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has gained attention for its simplicity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Yuhang Zhou , Jing Zhu , Shengyi Qian , Zhuokai Zhao , Xiyao Wang , Xiaoyu Liu , Ming Li , Paiheng Xu , Wei Ai , Furong Huang

The rapidly increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise an urgent need to align AI systems with diverse human preferences to simultaneously enhance their usefulness and safety, despite the often conflicting nature of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Zixuan Liu , Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

Recent alignment algorithms such as direct preference optimization (DPO) have been developed to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs) by training these models to match human behaviors exemplified by preference data. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Rheeya Uppaal , Apratim Dey , Yiting He , Yiqiao Zhong , Junjie Hu

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to improve the policy (denoiser) of diffusion large language models (dLLMs), while being hindered by the intractability of the policy likelihood. A dominant and efficient family of methods replaces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xiaohang Tang , Keyue Jiang , Che Liu , Qifang Zhao , Xiaoxiao Xu , Sangwoong Yoon , Ilija Bogunovic

Task-oriented dialogue systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention across various industries and achieved significant results. Current approaches condense complex procedural workflows into a single agent…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Zihao Feng , Xiaoxue Wang , Bowen Wu , Weihong Zhong , Zhen Xu , Hailong Cao , Tiejun Zhao , Ying Li , Baoxun Wang

The last year has witnessed the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) across diverse domains. Among them, CodeLLMs have garnered particular attention because they can not only assist in completing various programming tasks but also…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yibo Miao , Bofei Gao , Shanghaoran Quan , Junyang Lin , Daoguang Zan , Jiaheng Liu , Jian Yang , Tianyu Liu , Zhijie Deng

Instruction tuning is a standard paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs), but modern instruction datasets are large, noisy, and redundant, making full-data fine-tuning costly and often unnecessary. Existing data selection methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zhihang Yuan , Chengyu Yue , Long Huang , Litu Ou , Lei Shi

In this paper, we analyze the accuracy of gradient estimates obtained by linear interpolation when the underlying function is subject to bounded measurement noise. The total gradient error is decomposed into a deterministic component…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-07-29 Alejandro G. Marchetti , Dominique Bonvin

Despite emerging research on Language Models (LM), few approaches analyse the invertibility of LMs. That is, given a LM and a desirable target output sequence of tokens, determining what input prompts would yield the target output remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Kevin Yandoka Denamganaï , Kartic Subr

Derivative-free optimization (DFO) is a method that does not require the calculation of gradients or higher-order derivatives of the objective function, making it suitable for cases where the objective function is non-differentiable or the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-26 Qi Zhang , Pengcheng Xie

Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) is effective at significantly improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on downstream tasks such as reasoning, summarisation, and alignment. Using pairs of preferred and dispreferred…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Arka Pal , Deep Karkhanis , Samuel Dooley , Manley Roberts , Siddartha Naidu , Colin White

In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-19 Raghu Bollapragada , Cem Karamanli , Stefan M. Wild

We consider $\min\{f(x):g(x) \le 0, ~x\in X\},$ where $X$ is a compact convex subset of $\RR^m$, and $f$ and $g$ are continuous convex functions defined on an open neighbourhood of $X$. We work in the setting of derivative-free…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-10-25 Heinz H. Bauschke , Warren L. Hare , Walaa M. Moursi

Recent research explores optimization using large language models (LLMs) by either iteratively seeking next-step solutions from LLMs or directly prompting LLMs for an optimizer. However, these approaches exhibit inherent limitations,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-06 Zeyuan Ma , Hongshu Guo , Jiacheng Chen , Guojun Peng , Zhiguang Cao , Yining Ma , Yue-Jiao Gong

Prompt optimization methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning black-box large language models (LLMs). In parallel, inference scaling strategies such as Best-of-N Sampling and Majority Voting have likewise been shown to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Saaduddin Mahmud , Mason Nakamura , Kyle Hollins Wray , Shlomo Zilberstein

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has created an unprecedented demand for fine-tuning models for specialized domains, such as medical science. While federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized and privacy-preserving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Amir Faiyaz , Tara Salman

Discrete flow models (DFMs) are a class of flexible generative models for generating discrete data, and diffusion large language models (dLLMs) can be viewed as a special case with a specific choice of mixture path and a masked source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zhengyan Wan , Yidong Ouyang , Panwen Hu , Qiang Sun

We design Local LMO - a new projection-free gradient-type method for constrained optimization. The key algorithmic idea is to replace the global linear minimization oracle over the constraint set used by Frank-Wolfe (FW) with a local linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Peter Richtárik , Kaja Gruntkowska , Hanmin Li