Related papers: From Learning to Optimize to Learning Optimization…

Bayesian optimization (BO) has gained attention as an efficient algorithm for black-box optimization of expensive-to-evaluate systems, where the BO algorithm iteratively queries the system and suggests new trials based on a probabilistic…

Distributed optimization is fundamental to modern machine learning applications like federated learning, but existing methods often struggle with ill-conditioned problems and face stability-versus-speed tradeoffs. We introduce fractional…

Many real-world systems problems require reasoning about the long term consequences of actions taken to configure and manage the system. These problems with delayed and often sequentially aggregated reward, are often inherently…

Scientific discovery is increasingly constrained by costly experiments and limited resources, underscoring the need for efficient optimization in AI for science. Bayesian Optimization (BO), though widely adopted for balancing exploration…

Recent advances in algorithmic design show how to utilize predictions obtained by machine learning models from past and present data. These approaches have demonstrated an enhancement in performance when the predictions are accurate, while…

Recently, preference optimization methods such as DPO have significantly enhanced large language models (LLMs) in wide tasks including dialogue and question-answering. However, current methods fail to account for the varying difficulty…

The process of meta-learning algorithms from data, instead of relying on manual design, is growing in popularity as a paradigm for improving the performance of machine learning systems. Meta-learning shows particular promise for…

The vast majority of optimization and online learning algorithms today require some prior information about the data (often in the form of bounds on gradients or on the optimal parameter value). When this information is not available, these…

Recently, increased computational power and data availability, as well as algorithmic advances, have led machine learning techniques to impressive results in regression, classification, data-generation and reinforcement learning tasks.…

We introduce a new and increasingly relevant setting for distributed optimization in machine learning, where the data defining the optimization are unevenly distributed over an extremely large number of nodes. The goal is to train a…

We introduce a novel framework for analyzing sorting algorithms in pairwise ranking prompting (PRP), re-centering the cost model around LLM inferences rather than traditional pairwise comparisons. While classical metrics based on comparison…

Traditional query optimizers are designed to be fast and stateless: each query is quickly optimized using approximate statistics, sent off to the execution engine, and promptly forgotten. Recent work on learned query optimization have shown…

A recent line of works apply machine learning techniques to assist or rebuild cost-based query optimizers in DBMS. While exhibiting superiority in some benchmarks, their deficiencies, e.g., unstable performance, high training cost, and slow…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on human preferences, typically through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has proven successful in enhancing their capabilities. However, ensuring the safety of LLMs during…

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed learning approach that trains machine learning models across multiple devices while keeping their local data private. However, FL often faces challenges due to data heterogeneity, leading to…

This paper attempts to address the issues of machine learning in its current implementation. It is known that machine learning algorithms require a significant amount of data for training purposes, whereas recent developments in deep…

The principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty underpins many theoretically successful reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper we provide a general framework for designing, analyzing and implementing such algorithms in the…

Learning representations of algorithms is an emerging area of machine learning, seeking to bridge concepts from neural networks with classical algorithms. Several important works have investigated whether neural networks can effectively…

Learning to defer (L2D) enables human-AI cooperation by deciding when an AI system should act autonomously or defer to a human expert. Existing L2D methods, however, assume static human performance, contradicting well-established findings…

We study zeroth-order optimization where solutions must minimize a cost $d(s)$ while maintaining high probability under a complex generative prior $L(s)$ (e.g., a parameterized model). This reduces to sampling from a target distribution…