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Related papers: Test-Time Alignment of LLMs via Sampling-Based Opt…

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Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has become a critical step in their development. Recent research has increasingly focused on test-time alignment, where additional compute is allocated during inference to enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Bolian Li , Yanran Wu , Xinyu Luo , Ruqi Zhang

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) uses past samples to update the \textit{sampling policy} $q_t$ at each stage $t$. Each stage $t$ is formed with two steps : (i) to explore the space with $n_t$ points according to $q_t$ and (ii) to exploit…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-04 Bernard Delyon , François Portier

Inference-time computation is a powerful paradigm to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs), with Best-of-N sampling being a widely used technique. However, this method is computationally expensive, requiring both (1) an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Rohin Manvi , Anikait Singh , Stefano Ermon

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to cater to different human preferences, learning new skills, and unlearning harmful behavior is an important problem. Search-based methods, such as Best-of-N or Monte-Carlo Tree Search, are performant,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Seungwook Han , Idan Shenfeld , Akash Srivastava , Yoon Kim , Pulkit Agrawal

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is dominated by the cost of rollout generation, which has motivated the use of low-precision rollouts (e.g., FP8) paired with a BF16 trainer to improve throughput and reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-15 Jiajun Zhou , Wei Shao , Lingchao Zheng , Yuwei Fan , Ngai Wong

Several previous works concluded that the largest part of generation capabilities of large language models (LLM) are learned (early) during pre-training. However, LLMs still require further alignment to adhere to downstream task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ayoub Hammal , Pierre Zweigenbaum , Caio Corro

LLM alignment ensures that large language models behave safely and effectively by aligning their outputs with human values, goals, and intentions. Aligning LLMs employ huge amounts of data, computation, and time. Moreover, curating data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Amrit Khera , Rajat Ghosh , Debojyoti Dutta

Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models (GPLVMs) have become increasingly popular for unsupervised tasks such as dimensionality reduction and missing data recovery due to their flexibility and non-linear nature. An importance-weighted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jian Xu , Shian Du , Junmei Yang , Qianli Ma , Delu Zeng , John Paisley

Inference-time alignment techniques offer a lightweight alternative or complement to costly reinforcement learning, while enabling continual adaptation as alignment objectives and reward targets evolve. Existing theoretical analyses justify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ye Wang , Jing Liu , Toshiaki Koike-Akino

Instruction tuning enhances large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions across diverse tasks, relying on high-quality datasets to guide behavior. However, these datasets, whether manually curated or synthetically generated,…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human objectives is crucial for real-world applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs for alignment often suffers from unstable training and requires substantial computing resources. Test-time…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Lingkai Kong , Haorui Wang , Wenhao Mu , Yuanqi Du , Yuchen Zhuang , Yifei Zhou , Yue Song , Rongzhi Zhang , Kai Wang , Chao Zhang

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) across industries has increased the demand for high-quality and customizable outputs. However, traditional alignment methods often require retraining large pretrained models, making it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Yi Liu , Dianqing Liu , Mingye Zhu , Junbo Guo , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

In this paper, we propose a stochastic optimization method that adaptively controls the sample size used in the computation of gradient approximations. Unlike other variance reduction techniques that either require additional storage or the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-01 Raghu Bollapragada , Richard Byrd , Jorge Nocedal

The newly released OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated that test-time scaling can significantly improve model performance, especially in complex tasks such as logical reasoning. Common test-time scaling methods involve generating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Zhendong Tan , Xingjun Zhang , Chaoyi Hu , Yancheng Pan , Shaoxun Wang

Recent developments in large language models have shown advantages in reallocating a notable share of computational resource from training time to inference time. However, the principles behind inference time scaling are not well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Indranil Halder , Cengiz Pehlevan

Increasing test-time computation has emerged as a promising direction for improving language model performance, particularly in scenarios where model finetuning is impractical or impossible due to computational constraints or private model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Gonçalo Faria , Noah A. Smith

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) algorithms are widely used to approximate expectations with respect to complicated target probability distributions. When the target has heavy tails, existing AIS algorithms can provide inconsistent…

Computation · Statistics 2023-10-26 Thomas Guilmeau , Nicola Branchini , Emilie Chouzenoux , Víctor Elvira

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is a vital task for LLM practitioners. Current alignment techniques have several limitations: (1) requiring a large amount of annotated data; (2) demanding heavy human involvement; (3)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Hongyi Guo , Yuanshun Yao , Wei Shen , Jiaheng Wei , Xiaoying Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Yang Liu

To ensure that large language model (LLM) responses are helpful and non-toxic, a reward model trained on human preference data is usually used. LLM responses with high rewards are then selected through best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling or the LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Adam X. Yang , Maxime Robeyns , Thomas Coste , Zhengyan Shi , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Laurence Aitchison

We introduce time-to-unsafe-sampling, a novel safety measure for generative models, defined as the number of generations required by a large language model (LLM) to trigger an unsafe (e.g., toxic) response. While providing a new dimension…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Hen Davidov , Shai Feldman , Gilad Freidkin , Yaniv Romano
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