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

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Scheduled sampling is a technique for avoiding one of the known problems in sequence-to-sequence generation: exposure bias. It consists of feeding the model a mix of the teacher forced embeddings and the model predictions from the previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-28 Tsvetomila Mihaylova , André F. T. Martins

Much of the progress in contemporary NLP has come from learning representations, such as masked language model (MLM) contextual embeddings, that turn challenging problems into simple classification tasks. But how do we quantify and explain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Gregory Yauney , David Mimno

Diffusion models have become prevalent in generative modeling due to their ability to sample from complex distributions. To improve the quality of generated samples and their compliance with user requirements, two commonly used methods are:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Shervin Khalafi , Ignacio Hounie , Dongsheng Ding , Alejandro Ribeiro

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are core components for classification and regression tasks of many software systems. Companies incur in high costs for testing DNN with datasets representative of the inputs expected in operation, as these need…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Antonio Guerriero , Roberto Pietrantuono , Stefano Russo

Scheduled sampling is widely used to mitigate the exposure bias problem for neural machine translation. Its core motivation is to simulate the inference scene during training by replacing ground-truth tokens with predicted tokens, thus…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-01 Yijin Liu , Fandong Meng , Yufeng Chen , Jinan Xu , Jie Zhou

Social and real-world considerations such as robustness, fairness, social welfare and multi-agent tradeoffs have given rise to multi-distribution learning paradigms, such as collaborative learning, group distributionally robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Nika Haghtalab , Michael I. Jordan , Eric Zhao

Current methods for end-to-end constructive neural combinatorial optimization usually train a policy using behavior cloning from expert solutions or policy gradient methods from reinforcement learning. While behavior cloning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Jonathan Pirnay , Dominik G. Grimm

Despite the effectiveness of recurrent neural network language models, their maximum likelihood estimation suffers from two limitations. It treats all sentences that do not match the ground truth as equally poor, ignoring the structure of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-15 Maha Elbayad , Laurent Besacier , Jakob Verbeek

Alignment of large language models remains a central challenge in natural language processing. Preference optimization has emerged as a popular and effective method for improving alignment, typically through training-time or prompt-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Frédéric Berdoz , Luca A. Lanzendörfer , René Caky , Roger Wattenhofer

Self-rewarding have emerged recently as a powerful tool in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), allowing language models to generate high-quality relevant responses by providing their own rewards during training. This innovative…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Safouane El Ghazouali , Arnaud Gucciardi , Umberto Michelucci

The reward model (RM) plays a crucial role in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences through Reinforcement Learning, where the Bradley-Terry (BT) objective has been recognized as simple yet powerful, specifically for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhuo Li , Yuege Feng , Dandan Guo , Jinpeng Hu , Anningzhe Gao , Xiang Wan

Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Yuning Wu , Jieliang Luo , Hui Li

A wide variety of optimization techniques, both exact and heuristic, tend to be biased samplers. This means that when attempting to find multiple uncorrelated solutions of a degenerate Boolean optimization problem a subset of the solution…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2019-05-14 Andrew J. Ochoa , Darryl C. Jacob , Salvatore Mandrà , Helmut G. Katzgraber

Label smoothing is an effective regularization tool for deep neural networks (DNNs), which generates soft labels by applying a weighted average between the uniform distribution and the hard label. It is often used to reduce the overfitting…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Chang-Bin Zhang , Peng-Tao Jiang , Qibin Hou , Yunchao Wei , Qi Han , Zhen Li , Ming-Ming Cheng

We introduce a novel approach to large language model (LLM) distillation by formulating it as a constrained reinforcement learning problem. While recent work has begun exploring the integration of task-specific rewards into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Matthieu Zimmer , Xiaotong Ji , Tu Nguyen , Haitham Bou Ammar

Soft sensing is a way to indirectly obtain information of signals for which direct sensing is difficult or prohibitively expensive. It may not \textit{a priori} be evident which sensors provide useful information about the target signal,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-17 Le Wang , Ying Wang , Yu Qiu , Mian Li , Håkan Hjalmarsson

Top-$k$ decoding is a widely used method for sampling from LLMs: at each token, only the largest $k$ next-token-probabilities are kept, and the next token is sampled after re-normalizing them to sum to unity. Top-$k$ and other sampling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Georgy Noarov , Soham Mallick , Tao Wang , Sunay Joshi , Yan Sun , Yangxinyu Xie , Mengxin Yu , Edgar Dobriban

While solutions of Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) problems can sometimes have a higher out-of-sample expected reward than the Sample Average Approximation (SAA), there is no guarantee. In this paper, we introduce a class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-13 Jun-ya Gotoh , Michael Jong Kim , Andrew E. B. Lim

The $k$-of-$n$ testing problem involves performing $n$ independent tests sequentially, in order to determine whether/not at least $k$ tests pass. The objective is to minimize the expected cost of testing. This is a fundamental and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Rayen Tan , Viswanath Nagarajan

During language model decoding, it is known that using higher temperature sampling gives more creative responses, while lower temperatures are more factually accurate. However, such models are commonly applied to general instruction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Shehzaad Dhuliawala , Ilia Kulikov , Ping Yu , Asli Celikyilmaz , Jason Weston , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Jack Lanchantin