Related papers: Surprisal-Guided Selection: Compute-Optimal Test-T…

We propose a novel technique for algorithm-selection, applicable to optimisation domains in which there is implicit sequential information encapsulated in the data, e.g., in online bin-packing. Specifically we train two types of recurrent…

Stochastic gradient methods are scalable for solving large-scale optimization problems that involve empirical expectations of loss functions. Existing results mainly apply to optimization problems where the objectives are one- or two-level…

Query rewriting is pivotal for enhancing dense retrieval, yet current methods demand large-scale supervised data or suffer from inefficient reinforcement learning (RL) exploration. In this work, we first establish that guiding Large…

We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in reasoning tasks. A key approach is tree-based search with verifiers, which expand candidate reasoning paths and use reward models to guide pruning and selection. Although…

Online gradient descent (OGD) is well known to be doubly optimal under strong convexity or monotonicity assumptions: (1) in the single-agent setting, it achieves an optimal regret of $\Theta(\log T)$ for strongly convex cost functions; and…

What data or environments to use for training to improve downstream performance is a longstanding and very topical question in reinforcement learning. In particular, Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) methods have gained recent attention…

We combine two popular optimization approaches to derive learning algorithms for generative models: variational optimization and evolutionary algorithms. The combination is realized for generative models with discrete latents by using…

Stochastic gradient algorithms have been the main focus of large-scale learning problems and they led to important successes in machine learning. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of learning rate and the amount of the…

We consider the sample efficient estimation of failure probabilities from expensive oracle evaluations of a limit state function via importance sampling (IS). In contrast to conventional ``two stage'' approaches, which first train a…

Beyond training-time optimization, scaling test-time computation has emerged as a key paradigm to extend the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, most existing methods adopt a rigid Planning-before-Trial (PbT)…

Verifiers or reward models are often used to enhance the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). A common approach is the Best-of-N method, where N candidate solutions generated by the LLM are ranked by a verifier, and the…

Pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have shown promising zero-shot generalization in many downstream tasks with properly designed text prompts. Instead of relying on hand-engineered prompts, recent works learn prompts using the…

We study the generalization error of randomized learning algorithms -- focusing on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) -- using a novel combination of PAC-Bayes and algorithmic stability. Importantly, our generalization bounds hold for all…

Motivated by extreme multi-label classification applications, we consider training deep learning models over sparse data in multi-GPU servers. The variance in the number of non-zero features across training batches and the intrinsic GPU…

Despite success on a wide range of problems related to vision, generative adversarial networks (GANs) often suffer from inferior performance due to unstable training, especially for text generation. To solve this issue, we propose a new…

Using the bit string generation problem as a case study, we theoretically compare two standard methods for adapting large language models to new tasks. The first, referred to as supervised fine-tuning, involves training a new next token…

Open-vocabulary object detection with vision-language models (VLMs) such as Grounding DINO suffers from performance degradation under test-time distribution shifts, primarily due to semantic misalignment between text embeddings and shifted…

In distributed optimization problems, a technique called gradient coding, which involves replicating data points, has been used to mitigate the effect of straggling machines. Recent work has studied approximate gradient coding, which…

In this paper, we provide novel optimal (or near optimal) convergence rates for a clipped version of the stochastic subgradient method. We consider nonsmooth convex problems over possibly unbounded domains, under heavy-tailed noise that…