Related papers: Scaling Textual Gradients via Sampling-Based Momen…

Prompt engineering is a challenging and important task due to the high sensitivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the given prompt and the inherent ambiguity of a textual task instruction. Automatic prompt engineering is essential to…

Traditional RLHF optimizes language models with coarse, scalar rewards that mask the fine-grained reasons behind success or failure, leading to slow and opaque learning. Recent work augments RL with textual critiques through prompting or…

Training large language models (LLMs) poses challenges due to their massive scale and heterogeneous architectures. While adaptive optimizers like AdamW help address gradient variations, they still struggle with efficient and effective…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to memorize and recite some of the textual sequences from their training set verbatim, raising broad concerns about privacy and copyright issues when using LLMs. This Textual Sequence…

It is widely believed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs significantly worse than adaptive optimizers such as Adam in pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet the underlying reason for this gap remains unclear. In this…

The design and development of text-based knowledge graph completion (KGC) methods leveraging textual entity descriptions are at the forefront of research. These methods involve advanced optimization techniques such as soft prompts and…

Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…

Recent advances in test-time scaling have shown promising results in improving Large Language Model (LLM) performance through strategic computation allocation during inference. While this approach has demonstrated strong improvements in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse tasks, yet their training remains highly resource-intensive and susceptible to critical challenges such as training instability. A predominant source of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of natural language tasks, and recent efforts have sought to extend their capabilities to multimodal domains and resource-constrained environments. However,…

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), in which a momentum term is added to SGD, has been well studied in both theory and practice. The theoretical studies show that the settings of the learning rate and momentum weight affect…

Large language model (LLM) has achieved promising performance in multilingual machine translation tasks through zero/few-shot prompts or prompt-tuning. However, due to the mixture of multilingual data during the pre-training of LLM, the…

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the…

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have attracted great attention given their surprising performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. Length controlled generation of LLMs emerges as an important topic, which enables users to…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as these models become increasingly integrated into various societal and decision-making processes. Traditional methods, such as reinforcement learning from human…

We consider the contextual bandit problem, where a player sequentially makes decisions based on past observations to maximize the cumulative reward. Although many algorithms have been proposed for contextual bandit, most of them rely on…

System prompts provide a lightweight yet powerful mechanism for conditioning large language models (LLMs) at inference time. While prior work has focused on English-only settings, real-world deployments benefit from having a single prompt…

Large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks in 2023, but they still face challenges in complex reasoning. Theory-of-mind (ToM) tasks, which require understanding agents' beliefs, goals, and mental states, are essential for common-sense…

In this paper, we explore techniques centered around periodic sampling of model weights that provide convergence improvements on gradient update methods (vanilla \acs{SGD}, Momentum, Adam) for a variety of vision problems (classification,…