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Related papers: Preference Curriculum: LLMs Should Always Be Pretr…

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Improvements in language models are often driven by improving the quality of the data we train them on, which can be limiting when strong supervision is scarce. In this work, we show that paired preference data consisting of individually…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Scott Geng , Hamish Ivison , Chun-Liang Li , Maarten Sap , Jerry Li , Ranjay Krishna , Pang Wei Koh

Curriculum learning changes the order of pretraining data, but it remains unclear how ordering changes the learning dynamics. We pretrain models from 14M to 1B parameters for 300B tokens under three linguistically motivated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Mohamed Elgaar , Hadi Amiri

Data selection for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) can be framed as a budget-constrained optimization problem: maximizing a model's downstream performance under a strict training data budget. Solving this problem is generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Animesh Jha , Harshit Gupta , Ananjan Nandi

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex dialogue tasks without requiring use case-specific fine-tuning. However, analyzing live dialogues in real-time necessitates low-latency processing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Xuanqing Liu , Luyang Kong , Wei Niu , Afshin Khashei , Belinda Zeng , Steve Johnson , Jon Jay , Davor Golac , Matt Pope

The emergence of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) has achieved tremendous success in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) by learning universal representations on large corpora in a self-supervised manner. The pre-trained models…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Peng Liu , Lemei Zhang , Jon Atle Gulla

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) or multimodal large language models represent a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, enabling systems to understand and generate content across both visual and textual modalities. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Thanh Thi Nguyen , Campbell Wilson , Janis Dalins

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Angelica Chen , Sadhika Malladi , Lily H. Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Qiuyi Zhang , Rajesh Ranganath , Kyunghyun Cho

In this article, we investigate the alignment of Large Language Models according to human preferences. We discuss the features of training a Preference Model, which simulates human preferences, and the methods and details we found essential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Alexey Kutalev , Sergei Markoff

A common technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) relies on acquiring human preferences by comparing multiple generations conditioned on a fixed context. This method, however, relies solely on pairwise comparisons, where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Hritik Bansal , Ashima Suvarna , Gantavya Bhatt , Nanyun Peng , Kai-Wei Chang , Aditya Grover

The training paradigm integrating large language models (LLM) is gradually reshaping sequential recommender systems (SRS) and has shown promising results. However, most existing LLM-enhanced methods rely on rich textual information on the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Dugang Liu , Shenxian Xian , Xiaolin Lin , Xiaolian Zhang , Hong Zhu , Yuan Fang , Zhen Chen , Zhong Ming

Large language models are first pre-trained on trillions of tokens and then instruction-tuned or aligned to specific preferences. While pre-training remains out of reach for most researchers due to the compute required, fine-tuning has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Megh Thakkar , Quentin Fournier , Matthew D Riemer , Pin-Yu Chen , Amal Zouaq , Payel Das , Sarath Chandar

As a relative quality comparison of model responses, human and Large Language Model (LLM) preferences serve as common alignment goals in model fine-tuning and criteria in evaluation. Yet, these preferences merely reflect broad tendencies,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Junlong Li , Fan Zhou , Shichao Sun , Yikai Zhang , Hai Zhao , Pengfei Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Zichao Shen , Tianchen Zhu , Qingyun Sun , Shiqi Gao , Jianxin Li

Curriculum learning, a training technique where data is presented to the model in order of example difficulty (e.g., from simpler to more complex documents), has shown limited success for pre-training language models. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Loris Schoenegger , Lukas Thoma , Terra Blevins , Benjamin Roth

Large Language Models (LLMs) as autonomous agents are increasingly tasked with solving complex, long-horizon problems. Aligning these agents via preference-based offline methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Heyang Gao , Zexu Sun , Erxue Min , Hengyi Cai , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Xu Chen

What enables large language models (LLMs) to effectively model user preferences in sequential recommendation? Our investigation reveals that existing preference-alignment approaches largely rely on binary pairwise comparisons, overlooking…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Zhongyu Ouyang , Qianlong Wen , Chunhui Zhang , Yanfang Ye , Soroush Vosoughi

Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Emmy Liu , Kaiser Sun , Millicent Li , Isabelle Lee , Lindia Tjuatja , Jen-tse Huang , Graham Neubig

Recently, enhancing the numerical and logical reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a research hotspot. Existing methods face several limitations: inference-phase techniques (e.g., Chain of Thoughts) rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Hao Yi , Qingyang Li , Yulan Hu , Fuzheng Zhang , Di Zhang , Yong Liu

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for aligning policies with human intent but is often constrained by the high cost of human feedback. In this work, we introduce PrefVLM, a framework that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Udita Ghosh , Dripta S. Raychaudhuri , Jiachen Li , Konstantinos Karydis , Amit Roy-Chowdhury

In the rapidly advancing field of Large Language Models (LLMs), effectively leveraging existing datasets during fine-tuning to maximize the model's potential is of paramount importance. This paper introduces P3, an adaptive framework aimed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Yingxuan Yang , Huayi Wang , Muning Wen , Xiaoyun Mo , Qiuying Peng , Jun Wang , Weinan Zhang