Related papers: Why Do We Need Warm-up? A Theoretical Perspective
Generative models of complex systems often require post-hoc parameter adjustments to produce useful outputs. For example, energy-based models for protein design are sampled at an artificially low ''temperature'' to generate novel,…
Reasoning large language models (LLMs) excel in complex tasks, which has drawn significant attention to reinforcement learning (RL) for LLMs. However, existing approaches allocate an equal number of rollouts to all questions during the RL…
Learning Rate (LR) is an important hyper-parameter to tune for effective training of deep neural networks (DNNs). Even for the baseline of a constant learning rate, it is non-trivial to choose a good constant value for training a DNN.…
Advances in adversarial defenses have led to a significant improvement in the robustness of Deep Neural Networks. However, the robust accuracy of present state-ofthe-art defenses is far from the requirements in critical applications such as…
Recent research has shown the existence of significant redundancy in large Transformer models. One can prune the redundant parameters without significantly sacrificing the generalization performance. However, we question whether the…
We develop a thermodynamic theory for machine learning (ML) systems. Similar to physical thermodynamic systems which are characterized by energy and entropy, ML systems possess these characteristics as well. This comparison inspire us to…
Pretraining is a common technique in deep learning for increasing performance and reducing training time, with promising experimental results in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, pretraining requires a relevant dataset for…
In many recent applications, data is plentiful. By now, we have a rather clear understanding of how more data can be used to improve the accuracy of learning algorithms. Recently, there has been a growing interest in understanding how more…
Uncertainty quantification in reinforcement learning can greatly improve exploration and robustness. Approximate Bayesian approaches have recently been popularized to quantify uncertainty in model-free algorithms. However, so far the focus…
Commonly used optimization algorithms often show a trade-off between good generalization and fast training times. For instance, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) tends to have good generalization; however, adaptive gradient methods have…
Policy-gradient approaches to reinforcement learning have two common and undesirable overhead procedures, namely warm-start training and sample variance reduction. In this paper, we describe a reinforcement learning method based on a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents in human-computer interactions applications require repeated user interactions before they can perform well. To address this "cold start" problem, we propose a novel approach of using cognitive models to…
Training large language models with reinforcement learning (RL) against verifiable rewards significantly enhances their reasoning abilities, yet remains computationally expensive due to inefficient uniform prompt sampling. We introduce…
Decentralized training of deep learning models enables on-device learning over networks, as well as efficient scaling to large compute clusters. Experiments in earlier works reveal that, even in a data-center setup, decentralized training…
Very large deep learning models trained using gradient descent are remarkably resistant to memorization given their huge capacity, but are at the same time capable of fitting large datasets of pure noise. Here methods are introduced by…
Smooth activation functions are ubiquitous in modern deep learning, yet their theoretical advantages over non-smooth counterparts remain poorly understood. In this work, we study both approximation and statistical properties of neural…
Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…
Although deep learning has produced dazzling successes for applications of image, speech, and video processing in the past few years, most trainings are with suboptimal hyper-parameters, requiring unnecessarily long training times. Setting…
In this paper, we first present an explanation regarding the common occurrence of spikes in the training loss when neural networks are trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We provide evidence that the spikes in the training loss…
Inspired by recent research that recommends starting neural networks training with large learning rates (LRs) to achieve the best generalization, we explore this hypothesis in detail. Our study clarifies the initial LR ranges that provide…