Related papers: Better Instruction-Following Through Minimum Bayes…

When adapting an encoder to a new domain, the standard approach is to continue training with Masked Language Modeling (MLM). We show that temporarily switching to Causal Language Modeling (CLM) followed by a short MLM decay improves…

One of the most important challenges in text generation systems is to produce outputs that are not only correct but also diverse. Recently, Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding has gained prominence for generating sentences of the highest…

Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly used as evaluators in various applications, but the reliability of the outcomes remains a challenge. One such challenge is using LLMs-as-judges for direct assessment, i.e., assigning scores from a…

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in a wide range of applications, they have also been observed to perpetuate unwanted biases present in the training data, potentially leading to harm for…

Best-of-N (BoN) sampling with a reward model has been shown to be an effective strategy for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences at the time of decoding. BoN sampling is susceptible to a problem known as reward hacking…

We explore efficient strategies to fine-tune decoder-only Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream text classification under resource constraints. Two approaches are investigated: (1) attaching a classification head to a pretrained…

Relevance judgments are crucial for evaluating information retrieval systems, but traditional human-annotated labels are time-consuming and expensive. As a result, many researchers turn to automatic alternatives to accelerate method…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with only 7B parameters have shown promise as automated judges in chart comprehension tasks. However, tiny models (<=2B parameters) still perform poorly as judges, limiting their real-world use in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as evaluators, offering a scalable alternative to human annotation. However, existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches often fall short in domains that demand complex reasoning.…

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by decoupling generation and verification. While recent methods improve draft quality by tightly coupling the drafter with the target model, the…

With respect to improving the reasoning accuracy of LLMs, the representative reinforcement learning (RL) method GRPO faces failure due to insignificant reward variance, while verification methods based on process reward models (PRMs) suffer…

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is closely linked to their underlying size, leading to ever-growing networks and hence slower inference. Speculative decoding has been proposed as a technique to accelerate autoregressive…

Neural metrics have achieved impressive correlation with human judgements in the evaluation of machine translation systems, but before we can safely optimise towards such metrics, we should be aware of (and ideally eliminate) biases toward…

Conventional research on large language models (LLMs) has primarily focused on refining output distributions, while paying less attention to the decoding process that transforms these distributions into final responses. Recent advances,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) that can continually improve beyond their training budgets are able to solve increasingly difficult problems by adapting at test time, a property we refer to as extrapolation. However, standard reinforcement…

Multimodal embeddings are widely used in downstream tasks such as multimodal retrieval, enabling alignment of interleaved modalities in a shared representation space. While recent studies show that Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs)…

Judge Decoding accelerates LLM inference by relaxing the strict verification of Speculative Decoding, yet it typically relies on expensive and noisy supervision. In this work, we revisit this paradigm from first principles, revealing that…

Given the challenge of automatically evaluating free-form outputs from large language models (LLMs), an increasingly common solution is to use LLMs themselves as the judging mechanism, without any gold-standard scores. Implicitly, this…

Minimum Bayesian Risk Decoding (MBR) emerges as a promising decoding algorithm in Neural Machine Translation. However, MBR performs poorly with label smoothing, which is surprising as label smoothing provides decent improvement with beam…