Related papers: On a few pitfalls in KL divergence gradient estima…

The reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved by training them with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL objective for LLM training involves a regularization term, which is the reverse…

Multi-task post-training of large language models (LLMs) is typically performed by mixing datasets from different tasks and optimizing them jointly. This approach implicitly assumes that all tasks contribute gradients of similar magnitudes;…

Estimating Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence from samples of two distributions is essential in many machine learning problems. Variational methods using neural network discriminator have been proposed to achieve this task in a scalable…

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new avenues in education. This study examines the use of LLMs in supporting learning in machine learning education; in particular, it focuses on the ability of LLMs to…

Why is safety alignment in LLMs shallow? We prove that gradient-based alignment inherently concentrates on positions where harm is decided and vanishes beyond. Using a martingale decomposition of sequence-level harm, we derive an exact…

We present a theoretical framework showing that popular LLM alignment methods, including RLHF and its variants, can be understood as divergence estimators between aligned (safe or preferred) and unaligned (harmful or less preferred)…

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between random variables is a fundamental problem in statistical analysis. For continuous random variables, traditional information-theoretic estimators scale poorly with dimension and/or…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate considerable potential in various natural language tasks but face significant challenges in mathematical reasoning, particularly in executing precise, multi-step logic. However, current evaluation…

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used for problem-solving tasks. Most recent work improves their performance through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with labeled data or reinforcement learning (RL) from task feedback. In this…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in security research. Their unique characteristics, however, introduce challenges that undermine established paradigms of reproducibility, rigor, and evaluation. Prior work has…

In this paper, we study the problem of uncertainty estimation and calibration for LLMs. We begin by formulating the uncertainty estimation problem, a relevant yet underexplored area in existing literature. We then propose a supervised…

Large language models (LLMs) have made fundamental contributions over the last a few years. To train an LLM, one needs to alternatingly run `forward' computations and `backward' computations. The forward computation can be viewed as…

Reparameterization (RP) and likelihood ratio (LR) gradient estimators are used to estimate gradients of expectations throughout machine learning and reinforcement learning; however, they are usually explained as simple mathematical tricks,…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to forecasting tasks, with some works claiming these systems match or exceed human performance. In this paper, we argue that, as a community, we should be careful about such…

Recent advances in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to large language models (LLMs) have led to substantial progress. In particular, a series of remarkable yet often counterintuitive phenomena have been reported in LLMs, exhibiting…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is frequently employed in fine-tuning large language models (LMs), such as GPT-3, to penalize them for undesirable features of generated sequences, such as offensiveness, social bias, harmfulness or falsehood.…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss to stabilize training and prevent overfitting. However, in methods such as GRPO, its implementation may be guided by principles from…

Lack of reliability is a well-known issue for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. This problem has gained increasing attention in recent years, and efforts to improve it have grown substantially. To aid RL researchers and production…

Despite advances in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning and instruction-following tasks, it is unclear whether they can reliably produce outputs aligned with a variety of user goals, a concept called steerability. Two gaps in current…

Despite the fact that large language models (LLMs) show exceptional skill in instruction following tasks, this strength can turn into a vulnerability when the models are required to disregard certain instructions. Instruction-following…