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Test-time scaling investigates whether a fixed diffusion language model (DLM) can generate better outputs when given more inference compute, without additional training. However, naive best-of-$K$ sampling is fundamentally limited because…

Test-time scaling has emerged as a critical avenue for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Though the straight-forward ''best-of-$N$'' (BoN) strategy has already demonstrated significant improvements in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Muheng Li , Jian Qian , Wenlong Mou

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for tackling complex reasoning tasks, including optimization problems. However, existing methods either rely on prompt engineering, which leads to poor generalization across problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Dong Li , Xujiang Zhao , Linlin Yu , Yanchi Liu , Wei Cheng , Zhengzhang Chen , Zhong Chen , Feng Chen , Chen Zhao , Haifeng Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities, but aligning their outputs with human preferences typically requires expensive supervised fine-tuning. Recent test-time methods leverage textual feedback…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Shibing Mo , Haoyang Ruan , Kai Wu , Jing Liu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by generating natural language (NL) rationales that lead to the final answer. However, it struggles with numerical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Cheryl Li , Tianyuan Xu , Yiwen Guo

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in reasoning tasks. A key approach is tree-based search with verifiers, which expand candidate reasoning paths and use reward models to guide pruning and selection. Although…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Yingqian Cui , Zhenwei Dai , Pengfei He , Bing He , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Jingying Zeng , Suhang Wang , Yue Xing , Jiliang Tang , Benoit Dumoulin

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shuai Zhao , Yunqiu Xu , Linchao Zhu , Yi Yang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse and multifaceted user preferences is a fundamental challenge in personalized AI systems. Existing multi-objective alignment methods either rely on costly training or require pre-trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Linhao Luo , Thuy-Trang Vu , Van-Anh Nguyen , Junae Kim , Gholamreza Haffari , Dinh Phung

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu

Aligning large language models with humans is challenging due to the inherently multifaceted nature of preference feedback. While existing approaches typically frame this as a multi-objective optimization problem, they often overlook how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Mohamad Chehade , Soumya Suvra Ghosal , Souradip Chakraborty , Avinash Reddy , Dinesh Manocha , Hao Zhu , Amrit Singh Bedi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs), but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality of training problems. This sensitivity stems from the non-stationarity of RL:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Ningyuan Yang , Weihua Du , Weiwei Sun , Sean Welleck , Yiming Yang

The availability of large pre-trained models is changing the landscape of Machine Learning research and practice, moving from a training-from-scratch to a fine-tuning paradigm. While in some applications the goal is to "nudge" the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Tomasz Korbak , Hady Elsahar , Germán Kruszewski , Marc Dymetman

The rapid evolution of e-commerce has exposed the limitations of traditional product retrieval systems in managing complex, multi-turn user interactions. Recent advances in multimodal generative retrieval -- particularly those leveraging…

Best-of-N selection is a key technique for improving the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through increased test-time computation. Current state-of-the-art methods often employ computationally intensive reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Zhewei Kang , Xuandong Zhao , Dawn Song

Post-training alignment is central to deploying large language models (LLMs), yet practical workflows remain split across backend-specific tools and ad-hoc glue code, making experiments hard to reproduce. We identify backend interference,…

The quality of finetuning data is crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. Current methods to improve data quality are either labor-intensive or prone to factual errors caused by LLM hallucinations. This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Run-Ze Fan , Xuefeng Li , Haoyang Zou , Junlong Li , Shwai He , Ethan Chern , Jiewen Hu , Pengfei Liu

Large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for global enterprise applications due to substantial performance gaps between high-resource and mid/low-resource languages, driven by English-centric pretraining and internal reasoning biases.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Amit Agarwal , Hansa Meghwani , Hitesh Laxmichand Patel , Tao Sheng , Sujith Ravi , Dan Roth

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but require careful alignment with human preferences. Traditional training-time methods finetune LLMs using human preference datasets but incur significant training costs and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Yuancheng Xu , Udari Madhushani Sehwag , Alec Koppel , Sicheng Zhu , Bang An , Furong Huang , Sumitra Ganesh

Verifiers or reward models are often used to enhance the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). A common approach is the Best-of-N method, where N candidate solutions generated by the LLM are ranked by a verifier, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Lunjun Zhang , Arian Hosseini , Hritik Bansal , Mehran Kazemi , Aviral Kumar , Rishabh Agarwal

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical, yet traditional fine-tuning methods are computationally expensive and inflexible. While test-time alignment offers a promising alternative, existing approaches often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Tiesunlong Shen , Rui Mao , Jin Wang , Heming Sun , Jian Zhang , Xuejie Zhang , Erik Cambria