Related papers: DRO-InstructZero: Distributionally Robust Prompt O…
Many machine learning tasks involve subpopulation shift where the testing data distribution is a subpopulation of the training distribution. For such settings, a line of recent work has proposed the use of a variant of empirical risk…
Prompt-based learning is susceptible to intrinsic bias present in pre-trained language models (LMs), leading to sub-optimal performance in prompt-based zero/few-shot settings. In this work, we propose a null-input prompting method to…
We investigate the use of distributionally robust optimization (DRO) as a tractable tool to recover the asymptotic statistical guarantees provided by the Central Limit Theorem, for maintaining the feasibility of an expected value constraint…
The recent development of zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) has opened a new avenue for learning pre-trained generalist policies that can adapt to arbitrary new tasks in a zero-shot manner. While the popular Forward-Backward…
We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries,…
Distribution shifts and minority subpopulations frequently undermine the reliability of deep neural networks trained using Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM). Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) addresses this by optimizing for the…
Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) provides a framework for decision-making under distributional uncertainty, yet its effectiveness can be compromised by outliers in the training data. This paper introduces a principled approach to…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) integrates large language models ( LLM s) with retrievers to access external knowledge, improving the factuality of LLM generation in knowledge-grounded tasks. To optimize the RAG performance, most…
Re-rankers, which order retrieved documents with respect to the relevance score on the given query, have gained attention for the information retrieval (IR) task. Rather than fine-tuning the pre-trained language model (PLM), the large-scale…
Distillation enables compact Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to obtain strong reasoning capabilities, yet the prompts driving this process are typically chosen via simple heuristics or aggregated from off-the-shelf datasets. We reveal a…
Analysis of vision-and-language models has revealed their brittleness under linguistic phenomena such as paraphrasing, negation, textual entailment, and word substitutions with synonyms or antonyms. While data augmentation techniques have…
Enhancing the zero-shot performance of instruction-following models requires heavy computation, either by scaling the total number of training datasets or the model size. In this work, we explore how retrieval of soft prompts obtained…
Many existing transfer learning methods rely on leveraging information from source data that closely resembles the target data. However, this approach often overlooks valuable knowledge that may be present in different yet potentially…
To address the needs of modeling uncertainty in sensitive machine learning applications, the setup of distributionally robust optimization (DRO) seeks good performance uniformly across a variety of tasks. The recent multi-distribution…
Noisy data are often viewed as a challenge for decision-making. This paper studies a distributionally robust optimization (DRO) that shows how such noise can be systematically incorporated. Rather than applying DRO to the noisy empirical…
This paper studies Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), a fundamental framework for enhancing the robustness and generalization of statistical learning and optimization. An effective ambiguity set for DRO must involve distributions…
Prompt optimization methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning black-box large language models (LLMs). In parallel, inference scaling strategies such as Best-of-N Sampling and Majority Voting have likewise been shown to…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open…
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without direct data sharing, but its performance can degrade significantly in the presence of data distribution perturbations. Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) provides…
Prepending model inputs with safety prompts is a common practice for safeguarding large language models (LLMs) against queries with harmful intents. However, the underlying working mechanisms of safety prompts have not been unraveled yet,…