Related papers: ZERA: Zero-init Instruction Evolving Refinement Ag…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance but lack the flexibility to adapt to human preferences quickly without retraining. In this work, we introduce Test-time Preference Optimization (TPO), a framework that aligns…

This paper introduces Uniform Orthogonal Reinitialization Adaptation (UORA), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approach for Large Language Models (LLMs). UORA achieves state-of-the-art performance and parameter efficiency by…

Low-rank adaptation is a popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for large language models. In this paper, we analyze the impact of low-rank updating, as implemented in LoRA. Our findings suggest that the low-rank updating mechanism…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Yet existing methods share a common blind spot: they optimize policies…

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Column Type Annotation (CTA) is a fundamental step towards enabling schema alignment and semantic understanding of tabular data. Existing encoder-only language models achieve high accuracy when fine-tuned on labeled columns, but their…

Large language models are highly sensitive to prompt wording. However, popular automatic prompt search methods, including InstructZero, often degrade under distribution shift and adversarial evaluation because they optimize expected…

Automatic program repair (APR) aims to reduce the manual efforts required to identify and fix errors in source code. Before the rise of LLM-based agents, a common strategy was to increase the number of generated patches, sometimes to the…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a parameter-efficient approach for fine-tuning large language models. However, conventional LoRA adapters are typically trained for a single task, limiting their applicability in real-world settings…

Fine-tuning helps large language models (LLM) recover degraded information and enhance task performance. Although Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely used and effective for fine-tuning, we have observed that its scaling factor can limit or…

Effective prompt engineering remains a central challenge in fully harnessing the capabilities of LLMs. While well-designed prompts can dramatically enhance performance, crafting them typically demands expert intuition and a nuanced…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method validated across NLP and CV domains. However, LoRA faces an inherent low-rank bottleneck: narrowing its performance gap with full finetuning…

Personalizing jargon detection and explanation is essential for making technical documents accessible to readers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. However, tailoring models to individual users typically requires substantial annotation…

Hyperparameter optimization is critical in modern machine learning, requiring expert knowledge, numerous trials, and high computational and human resources. Despite the advancements in Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), challenges in…

We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include a regularization term, using (possibly noisy) evaluations of the function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or…

Zeroth-Order Optimization (ZOO) provides powerful tools for optimizing functions where explicit gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. However, the underlying mechanisms of popular ZOO methods, particularly those employing…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance on various NLP tasks via task prompting. And their performance can be further improved by appending task demonstrations to the head of the prompt. And usually, a better…

Most prompt-optimization methods refine a single static template, making them ineffective in complex and dynamic user scenarios. Existing query-dependent approaches rely on unstable textual feedback or black-box reward models, providing…

We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling approaches, particularly when fine-tuned with chain-of-thought (CoT) data distilled from more powerful large reasoning models (LRMs).…