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

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…

Despite the empirical success of meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL), there are still a number poorly-understood discrepancies between theory and practice. Critically, biased gradient estimates are almost always implemented in practice,…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the predominant approach for language model (LM) alignment. At its core, RLHF uses a margin-based loss for preference optimization, specifying ideal LM behavior only by the…

Current benchmarks are inadequate for evaluating progress in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs).Despite recent benchmark gains reported for RL, we find that training on these benchmarks' training sets achieves…

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:…

We propose an algorithm to estimate the path-gradient of both the reverse and forward Kullback-Leibler divergence for an arbitrary manifestly invertible normalizing flow. The resulting path-gradient estimators are straightforward to…

Some prior work has shown that LLMs perform well in NLG evaluation for different tasks. However, we discover that LLMs seem to confuse different evaluation criteria, which reduces their reliability. For further verification, we first…

A well-recognized limitation of kernel learning is the requirement to handle a kernel matrix, whose size is quadratic in the number of training examples. Many methods have been proposed to reduce this computational cost, mostly by using a…

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by the target model. The speedup is significantly…

Direct evaluation of LLMs on benchmarks can be misleading because comparatively strong performance may reflect task familiarity rather than capability. The train-before-test approach controls for task familiarity by giving each model…

We present a unified framework for Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning that integrates Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning. By analyzing the gradient of a composite objective combining trajectory-level KL divergence with task…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their deployment is frequently undermined by undesirable behaviors such as generating harmful content, factual inaccuracies, and societal biases. Diagnosing the…

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions given samples from them is well-studied in machine learning and information theory. Motivated by considerations of multi-group fairness, we seek KL divergence…

We present a convergence rate analysis for biased stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where individual gradient updates are corrupted by computation errors. We develop stochastic quadratic constraints to formulate a small linear matrix…

While multi-task learning (MTL) has gained significant attention in recent years, its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent methods did not yield consistent performance improvements over single task learning (STL)…

Instruct LLM provide a paradigm used in large scale language model to align LLM to human preference. The paradigm contains supervised fine tuning and reinforce learning from human feedback. This paradigm is also used in downstream scenarios…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to evaluate information retrieval (IR) systems, generating relevance judgments traditionally made by human assessors. Recent empirical studies suggest that LLM-based evaluations often align…

Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) innovations are being introduced at such a rapid pace that model owners and evaluators are hard-pressed analyzing and studying them. This is exacerbated by the complicated procedures for…