English
Related papers

Related papers: Reward-Shifted Speculative Sampling Is An Efficien…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a prevalent approach to align AI systems with human values by learning rewards from human preference data. Due to various reasons, however, such data typically takes the form of rankings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Ilgee Hong , Zichong Li , Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Haoming Jiang , Tianbao Yang , Tuo Zhao

Language model alignment is a critical step in training modern generative language models. Alignment targets to improve win rate of a sample from the aligned model against the base model. Today, we are increasingly using inference-time…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown remarkable success in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Traditional RLHF methods rely on a fixed dataset, which often suffers from limited coverage. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Long-Fei Li , Yu-Yang Qian , Peng Zhao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Speculative decoding accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by generating draft tokens for target model verification. Current approaches for obtaining draft tokens rely on lightweight draft models or additional model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Guofeng Quan , Wenfeng Feng , Chuzhan Hao , Guochao Jiang , Yuewei Zhang , Hao Wang

Inference-time computation is a powerful paradigm to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs), with Best-of-N sampling being a widely used technique. However, this method is computationally expensive, requiring both (1) an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Rohin Manvi , Anikait Singh , Stefano Ermon

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a widely used paradigm to accelerate LLM inference without compromising quality. It works by first employing a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently and then using the target LLM to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Heming Xia , Yongqi Li , Jun Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Wenjie Li

Reward design in reinforcement learning and optimal control is challenging. Preference-based alignment addresses this by enabling agents to learn rewards from ranked trajectory pairs provided by humans. However, existing methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhixian Xie , Haode Zhang , Yizhe Feng , Wanxin Jin

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

The quadratic complexity of attention imposes severe memory and computational bottlenecks on Large Language Model (LLM) inference. This challenge is particularly acute for emerging agentic applications that require processing multi-million…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ceyu Xu , Jiangnan Yu , Yongji Wu , Yuan Xie

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token generation rates. However, currently available open-source dLLMs often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Sudhanshu Agrawal , Risheek Garrepalli , Raghavv Goel , Mingu Lee , Christopher Lott , Fatih Porikli

Reward-based fine-tuning steers a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model. Although existing methods are derived from different perspectives, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jeongjae Lee , Jinho Chang , Jeongsol Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become a crucial step for aligning pretrained large language models (LLMs) using supervised datasets of input-output pairs. However, despite being supervised, SFT is inherently limited by its generative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Siqi Guo , Ilgee Hong , Vicente Balmaseda , Changlong Yu , Liang Qiu , Xin Liu , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao , Tianbao Yang

With the rapid advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), aligning LLMs with human preferences become increasingly important. Although Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective, it is complicated and highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Shiqi Wang , Zhengze Zhang , Rui Zhao , Fei Tan , Cam Tu Nguyen

Recently, speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a small draft model to propose draft tokens in advance, and validating them in parallel with the large target model. However,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yuhao Shen , Junyi Shen , Quan Kong , Tianyu Liu , Yao Lu , Cong Wang

This paper presents a simple, effective, and cost-efficient strategy to improve LLM performance by scaling test-time compute. Our strategy builds upon the repeated-sampling-then-voting framework, with a novel twist: incorporating multiple…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Jianhao Chen , Zishuo Xun , Bocheng Zhou , Han Qi , Hangfan Zhang , Qiaosheng Zhang , Yang Chen , Wei Hu , Yuzhong Qu , Wanli Ouyang , Shuyue Hu

Recent advances with large language models (LLM) illustrate their diverse capabilities. We propose a novel algorithm, staged speculative decoding, to accelerate LLM inference in small-batch, on-device scenarios. We address the low…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Benjamin Spector , Chris Re

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

Test-time scaling (TTS) improves large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional compute at inference time. In practice, TTS is often achieved through parallel scaling: generating multiple candidate responses and selecting the best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Divya Shyamal , Marta Knežević , Lan Tran , Chanakya Ekbote , Vijay Lingam , Paul Pu Liang

Transformer-based autoregressive sampling has been the major bottleneck for slowing down large language model inferences. One effective way to accelerate inference is \emph{Speculative Decoding}, which employs a small model to sample a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Ming Yin , Minshuo Chen , Kaixuan Huang , Mengdi Wang