Related papers: Backward-Friendly Optimization: Training Large Lan…

The back-propagation algorithm is widely used for learning in artificial neural networks. A challenge in machine learning is to create models that generalize to new data samples not seen in the training data. Recently, a common flaw in…

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in open-ended scenarios is challenging because existing benchmarks and metrics can not measure them comprehensively. To address this problem, we propose to fine-tune LLMs as scalable judges (JudgeLM)…

The advent of large language models (LLMs) in the education sector has provided impetus to automate grading short answer questions. LLMs make evaluating short answers very efficient, thus addressing issues like staff shortage. However, in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically aligned for safety during the post-training phase; however, they may still generate inappropriate outputs that could potentially pose risks to users. This challenge underscores the need for robust…

Post-training alignment is central to deploying large language models (LLMs), yet practical workflows remain split across backend-specific tools and ad-hoc glue code, making experiments hard to reproduce. We identify backend interference,…

Training instability in modern deep learning systems is frequently triggered by rare but extreme gradient-norm spikes, which can induce oversized parameter updates, corrupt optimizer state, and lead to slow recovery or divergence. Widely…

We study two procedures (reverse-mode and forward-mode) for computing the gradient of the validation error with respect to the hyperparameters of any iterative learning algorithm such as stochastic gradient descent. These procedures mirror…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order optimization (ZO) offers a memory-efficient alternative to gradient-based methods but suffers from slower convergence and unstable optimization due to noisy gradient estimates.…

In this work, we propose GLOV, which enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to act as implicit optimizers for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance downstream vision tasks. GLOV prompts an LLM with the downstream task description, querying…

Large-batch training has become a cornerstone in accelerating the training of deep neural networks, yet it poses challenges in optimization and generalization. Existing optimizers like AdamW present performance degradation during language…

Large language model (LLM) training is often bottlenecked by memory constraints and stochastic gradient noise in extremely high-dimensional parameter spaces. Motivated by empirical evidence that many LLM gradient matrices are effectively…

Adaptive gradient optimization methods, such as Adam, are prevalent in training deep neural networks across diverse machine learning tasks due to their ability to achieve faster convergence. However, these methods often suffer from…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as evaluators, offering a scalable alternative to human annotation. However, existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches often fall short in domains that demand complex reasoning.…

Large visual language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated excellent instruction-following capabilities, yet remain vulnerable to stealthy backdoor attacks when finetuned using contaminated data. Existing backdoor defense techniques are usually…

Adaptive optimization methods such as AdaGrad, RMSprop and Adam have been proposed to achieve a rapid training process with an element-wise scaling term on learning rates. Though prevailing, they are observed to generalize poorly compared…

LLM-based Automatic Prompt Optimization, which typically utilizes LLMs as Prompt Optimizers to self-reflect and refine prompts, has shown promising performance in recent studies. Despite the success, the underlying mechanism of this…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in multi-image cross-modal retrieval, yet suffer from severe position bias, where predictions are dominated by input order rather than semantic relevance. Through…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffers from training collapse in long-horizon tasks due to exploding gradient variance. To mitigate this, a baseline is commonly introduced for advantage computation;…

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) for downstream tasks is a large-scale optimization problem, in which the choice of the training algorithm critically determines how well the trained model can generalize to unseen test data,…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in understanding and generating human language, but efficient inference on resource-constrained embedded devices remains challenging due to large model sizes and…