Related papers: Variational Best-of-N Alignment
Reward-based fine-tuning steers a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model. Although existing methods are derived from different perspectives, we show…
Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising general-purpose solvers for combinatorial optimization (CO), yet they fundamentally lack mechanisms to guarantee solution feasibility which is critical for real-world deployment. In…
In this work, we investigate the merits of explicitly optimizing for inference time algorithmic performance during model training. We show how optimizing for inference time performance can improve overall model efficacy. We consider generic…
Dynamical generative models that produce samples through an iterative process, such as Flow Matching and denoising diffusion models, have seen widespread use, but there have not been many theoretically-sound methods for improving these…
Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…
Variational Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) perform variational inference over weights, but it is difficult to specify meaningful priors and approximate posteriors in a high-dimensional weight space. We introduce functional variational…
Reinforcement Learning frameworks, particularly those utilizing human annotations, have become an increasingly popular method for preference fine-tuning, where the outputs of a language model are tuned to match a certain set of behavioral…
Reinforcement learning is used to align language models with human preference signals after first pre-training the model to predict the next token of text within a large corpus using likelihood maximization. Before being deployed in a…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…
Diffusion alignment aims to optimize diffusion models for the downstream objective. While existing methods based on reinforcement learning or direct backpropagation achieve considerable success in maximizing rewards, they often suffer from…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various visual understanding and reasoning tasks, driven by incorporating image representations into the token inputs of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, their…
Inferring reward functions from demonstrations and pairwise preferences are auspicious approaches for aligning Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human intentions. However, state-of-the art methods typically focus on learning a single…
In this paper, we aim to align large language models with the ever-changing, complex, and diverse human values (e.g., social norms) across time and locations. This presents a challenge to existing alignment techniques, such as supervised…
An emerging paradigm in vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is the use of history-aware multi-modal transformer models. Given a language instruction, these models process observation and navigation history to predict the most appropriate…
The Robbins-Monro stochastic approximation algorithm is a foundation of many algorithmic frameworks for reinforcement learning (RL), and often an efficient approach to solving (or approximating the solution to) complex optimal control…
Despite its notable success in adversarial learning approaches to multi-domain task-oriented dialog system, training the dialog policy via adversarial inverse reinforcement learning often fails to balance the performance of the policy…
The k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) classification rule has proven extremely successful in countless many computer vision applications. For example, image categorization often relies on uniform voting among the nearest prototypes in the space of…
Diffusion models and flow matching have demonstrated remarkable success in text-to-image generation. While many existing alignment methods primarily focus on fine-tuning pre-trained generative models to maximize a given reward function,…
Consider a collection of competing machine learning algorithms. Given their performance on a benchmark of datasets, we would like to identify the best performing algorithm. Specifically, which algorithm is most likely to rank highest on a…