Related papers: Soft Best-of-n Sampling for Model Alignment

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to cater to different human preferences, learning new skills, and unlearning harmful behavior is an important problem. Search-based methods, such as Best-of-N or Monte-Carlo Tree Search, are performant,…

Inference-time computation offers a powerful axis for scaling the performance of language models. However, naively increasing computation in techniques like Best-of-N sampling can lead to performance degradation due to reward hacking.…

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…

Obtaining high-quality generations in modern LLMs has largely been framed as a selection problem: identifying a single winning generation from a diverse pool of N samples, the Best-of-N (BoN). Yet, this approach is inherently zero-sum,…

Inference-time compute scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving language model performance on a wide range of tasks, but the question of how best to use the additional compute remains open. A popular approach is BoN…

Recent advances in test-time alignment methods, such as Best-of-N sampling, offer a simple and effective way to steer language models (LMs) toward preferred behaviors using reward models (RM). However, these approaches can be…

A simple and effective method for the inference-time alignment and scaling test-time compute of generative models is best-of-$n$ sampling, where $n$ samples are drawn from a reference policy, ranked based on a reward function, and the…

Decoding sits between a language model and everything we do with it, yet it is still treated as a heuristic knob-tuning exercise. We argue decoding should be understood as a principled optimisation layer: at each token, we solve a…

Softmax is the most commonly used output function for multiclass problems and is widely used in areas such as vision, natural language processing, and recommendation. A softmax model has linear costs in the number of classes which makes it…

The safe and effective deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) involves a critical step called alignment, which ensures that the model's responses are in accordance with human preferences. Prevalent alignment techniques, such as DPO, PPO…

Recent studies have indicated that effectively utilizing inference-time compute is crucial for attaining better performance from large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose a novel inference-aware fine-tuning paradigm, in which…

We study the problem of training diffusion and flow generative models to sample from target distributions defined by an exponential tilting of a base density; a formulation that subsumes both sampling from unnormalized densities and reward…

Recent advances in aligning large language models with human preferences have corroborated the growing importance of best-of-N distillation (BOND). However, the iterative BOND algorithm is prohibitively expensive in practice due to the…

Let $p$ denote a generative language model. Let $r$ denote a reward model that returns a scalar that captures the degree at which a draw from $p$ is preferred. The goal of language model alignment is to alter $p$ to a new distribution…

The pervasive issue of bias in AI presents a significant challenge to painting classification, and is getting more serious as these systems become increasingly integrated into tasks like art curation and restoration. Biases, often arising…

Test-time compute (TTC) has become an increasingly prominent paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs). Despite the empirical success of methods such as best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling and sequential revision, their fundamental limits…

Large Language Models have revolutionized recommender systems (LLM4Rec) by leveraging their generative capabilities to model complex user preferences. However, existing LLM4Rec methods primarily rely on token-level objectives, making it…

Calibration weighting has been widely used to correct selection biases in non-probability sampling, missing data, and causal inference. The main idea is to calibrate the biased sample to the benchmark by adjusting the subject weights.…

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…

We point out important problems with the common practice of using the best single model performance for comparing deep learning architectures, and we propose a method that corrects these flaws. Each time a model is trained, one gets a…