English
Related papers

Related papers: Evolution Strategies at Scale: LLM Fine-Tuning Bey…

200 papers

This work introduces EE-Tuning, a lightweight and economical solution to training/tuning early-exit large language models (LLMs). In contrast to the common approach of full-parameter pre-training, EE-Tuning augments any pre-trained (and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Xuchen Pan , Yanxi Chen , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

While large language models (LLMs) often adopt finetuning to unlock their capabilities for downstream applications, our understanding on the inductive biases (especially the scaling properties) of different finetuning methods is still…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Biao Zhang , Zhongtao Liu , Colin Cherry , Orhan Firat

Large reasoning models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore long chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving strong performance at high computational cost. Recent methods add multi-reward objectives to jointly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anhao Zhao , Ziyang Chen , Junlong Tong , Yingqi Fan , Fanghua Ye , Shuhao Li , Yunpu Ma , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly costly to deploy, motivating extensive research on model pruning. However, most existing studies focus on instruction-following LLMs, leaving it unclear whether established pruning strategies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Longwei Ding , Anhao Zhao , Fanghua Ye , Ziyang Chen , Xiaoyu Shen

The application of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitutes a rapidly advancing research area. While MLLMs extend Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Guanghao Zhou , Panjia Qiu , Cen Chen , Jie Wang , Zheming Yang , Jian Xu , Minghui Qiu

Data selection for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) can be framed as a budget-constrained optimization problem: maximizing a model's downstream performance under a strict training data budget. Solving this problem is generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Animesh Jha , Harshit Gupta , Ananjan Nandi

While search-augmented large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities, their reliability in complex multi-hop reasoning remains limited. This limitation arises from three fundamental challenges: decomposition errors, where…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ziliang Wang , Kang An , Xuhui Zheng , Faqiang Qian , Weikun Zhang , Cijun Ouyang , Jialu Cai , Yuhang Wang , Yichao Wu

In the evolutionary computing community, the remarkable language-handling capabilities and reasoning power of large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the functionality of evolutionary algorithms (EAs), enabling them to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Jiao Liu , Zhu Sun , Shanshan Feng , Caishun Chen , Yew-Soon Ong

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become essential for adapting pretrained models to specific downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose Linear Chain Transformation (LinChain), a novel approach that introduces a sequence of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Yulong Wang , Chang Zuo , Yin Xuan , Hong Li , Ni Wei

We explore the use of Evolution Strategies (ES), a class of black box optimization algorithms, as an alternative to popular MDP-based RL techniques such as Q-learning and Policy Gradients. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari show that ES is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-11 Tim Salimans , Jonathan Ho , Xi Chen , Szymon Sidor , Ilya Sutskever

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for sequential decision-making and has attracted growing interest across various domains, particularly following the advent of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in 2015.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Dong Wang , Hanmo You , Lingwei Zhu , Kaiwei Lin , Zheng Chen , Chen Yang , Junji Yu , Zan Wang , Junjie Chen

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive success in control tasks. However, its policies, represented as opaque neural networks, are often difficult for humans to understand, verify, and debug, which undermines trust and hinders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Qinglong Hu , Xialiang Tong , Mingxuan Yuan , Fei Liu , Zhichao Lu , Qingfu Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, reinforcement learning for LLMs faces substantial data scarcity challenges,…

Recently DeepSeek R1 has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through a simple yet effective design. The core of R1 lies in its rule-based reward…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Haozhan Shen , Peng Liu , Jingcheng Li , Chunxin Fang , Yibo Ma , Jiajia Liao , Qiaoli Shen , Zilun Zhang , Kangjia Zhao , Qianqian Zhang , Ruochen Xu , Tiancheng Zhao

Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EMA): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 David Kaczér , Magnus Jørgenvåg , Clemens Vetter , Esha Afzal , Robin Haselhorst , Lucie Flek , Florian Mai

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Tomasz Korbak , Ethan Perez , Christopher L Buckley

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered increasing attention in the field of natural language processing, revolutionizing numerous downstream tasks with powerful reasoning and generation abilities. For example, In-Context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Changzhi Zhou , Dandan Song , Yuhang Tian , Zhijing Wu , Hao Wang , Xinyu Zhang , Jun Yang , Ziyi Yang , Shuhao Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made substantial strides in structured tasks through Reinforcement Learning (RL), demonstrating proficiency in mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, applying RL in broader domains like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Hao Sun , Yunyi Shen , Jean-Francois Ton , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. For example, they can provide training signals to finetune LLMs during reinforcement learning (RL) and help select the best answer from multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qiyuan Liu , Hao Xu , Xuhong Chen , Wei Chen , Yee Whye Teh , Ning Miao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training alignment for language models is effective, but also costly and unstable in practice, owing to its complicated training process. To address this, we propose a training-free inference method to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiuyu Li , Jinkai Zhang , Mingyang Yi , Yu Li , Longqiang Wang , Yue Wang , Ju Fan