Related papers: Variational Best-of-N Alignment

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically follow a two-stage training paradigm-pretraining and supervised fine-tuning. Recently, preference optimization, derived from the language domain, has emerged as an effective post-training…

Inference-time computation methods enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging additional computational resources to achieve superior results. Common techniques, such as Best-of-N sampling, Majority Voting, and…

Increasing test-time computation has emerged as a promising direction for improving language model performance, particularly in scenarios where model finetuning is impractical or impossible due to computational constraints or private model…

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) are trained to optimize an entire distribution over their weights instead of a single set, having significant advantages in terms of, e.g., interpretability, multi-task learning, and calibration. Because of…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is the prevailing approach for efficient large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. Building on this paradigm, recent studies have proposed alternative initialization strategies, architectural modifications, and…

Test-time training (TTT) adapts language models through gradient-based updates at inference. But is adaptation the right strategy? We study compute-optimal test-time strategies for verifiable execution-grounded (VEG) tasks, domains like GPU…

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising approach for NP-hard problems. However, prevailing RL-based methods suffer from low sample efficiency due to sparse rewards and underused solutions. We propose Best-anchored…

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a natural language grounding task where agents have to interpret natural language instructions in the context of visual scenes in a dynamic environment to achieve prescribed navigation goals.…

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent work proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies…

Fine-tuning pre-trained models for downstream tasks is a widely adopted technique known for its adaptability and reliability across various domains. Despite its conceptual simplicity, fine-tuning entails several troublesome engineering…

Inference in both brains and machines can be formalized by optimizing a shared objective: maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in machine learning, or minimizing variational free energy (F) in neuroscience (ELBO = -F). While this…

Generative auto-bidding has demonstrated strong performance in online advertising, yet it often suffers from data scarcity in small-scale settings with limited advertiser participation. While cross-task data sharing is a natural remedy to…

Quantization is a fundamental optimization for many machine-learning use cases, including compressing gradients, model weights and activations, and datasets. The most accurate form of quantization is \emph{adaptive}, where the error is…

Large language models~(LLMs) are expected to be helpful, harmless, and honest. In different alignment scenarios, such as safety, confidence, and general preference alignment, binary preference data collection and reward modeling are…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and safety constraints is challenging, especially when objectives like helpfulness, truthfulness, and avoidance of harm conflict. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has…

Fine-tuning is the primary methodology for tailoring pre-trained large language models to specific tasks. As the model's scale and the diversity of tasks expand, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods are of paramount importance. One of…

A novel neural network (NN) approach is proposed for constrained optimization. The proposed method uses a specially designed NN architecture and training/optimization procedure called Neural Optimization Machine (NOM). The objective…

There exists a token imbalance phenomenon in natural language as different tokens appear with different frequencies, which leads to different learning difficulties for tokens in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The vanilla NMT model…

Core to the vision-and-language navigation (VLN) challenge is building robust instruction representations and action decoding schemes, which can generalize well to previously unseen instructions and environments. In this paper, we report…

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a variety of computer vision tasks. However, the multimodal reasoning capability has not been fully explored in existing models. In this paper, we propose a…