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Selecting appropriate training data is crucial for effective instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), which aims to (1) elicit strong capabilities, and (2) achieve balanced performance across a diverse range of tasks.…
Linear mixed models (LMMs) are instrumental for regression analysis with structured dependence, such as grouped, clustered, or multilevel data. However, selection among the covariates--while accounting for this structured…
Optimizing data mixtures is essential for unlocking the full potential of large language models (LLMs), yet identifying the optimal composition remains computationally prohibitive due to reliance on heuristic trials or expensive proxy…
Large language models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned on diverse and extensive datasets sourced from various origins to develop a comprehensive range of skills, such as writing, reasoning, chatting, coding, and more. Each skill has unique…
The performance of an LLM depends heavily on the relevance of its training data to the downstream evaluation task. However, in practice, the data involved in an unseen evaluation task is often unknown (e.g., conversations between an LLM and…
Data selection can reduce the amount of training data needed to finetune LLMs; however, the efficacy of data selection scales directly with its compute. Motivated by the practical challenge of compute-constrained finetuning, we consider the…
Scientific discovery is increasingly constrained by costly experiments and limited resources, underscoring the need for efficient optimization in AI for science. Bayesian Optimization (BO), though widely adopted for balancing exploration…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method to optimize costly black-box functions. While traditional BO optimizes each new target task from scratch, meta-learning has emerged as a way to leverage knowledge from related tasks to optimize…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on a mixture of diverse datasets poses challenges due to data imbalance and heterogeneity. Existing methods often address these issues across datasets (globally) but overlook the imbalance and…
Cooking typically involves a plethora of decisions about ingredients and tools that need to be chosen in order to write a good cooking recipe. Cooking can be modelled in an optimization framework, as it involves a search space of…
The optimal assignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized roles in multi-agent systems is a significant challenge, defined by a vast combinatorial search space, expensive black-box evaluations, and an inherent trade-off between…
Data Augmentation (DA) has become an essential tool to improve robustness and generalization of modern machine learning. However, when deciding on DA strategies it is critical to choose parameters carefully, and this can be a daunting task…
Optimal resource allocation in modern communication networks calls for the optimization of objective functions that are only accessible via costly separate evaluations for each candidate solution. The conventional approach carries out the…
Large language models (LLMs) can surpass humans in certain forecasting tasks. What role does this leave for humans in the overall decision process? One possibility is that humans, despite performing worse than LLMs, can still add value when…
The design (shape) of a robot is usually decided before the control is implemented. This might limit how well the design is adapted to a task, as the suitability of the design is given by how well the robot performs in the task, which…
State of the art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a variety of benchmark tasks and are increasingly used as components in larger applications, where LLM-based predictions serve as proxies for human…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code generation, largely driven by the availability of high-quality code datasets for effective training. To further improve data quality, numerous training data optimization…
A common technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) relies on acquiring human preferences by comparing multiple generations conditioned on a fixed context. This method, however, relies solely on pairwise comparisons, where the…
Many real-world scientific and industrial applications require the optimization of expensive black-box functions. Bayesian Optimization (BO) provides an effective framework for such problems. However, traditional BO methods are prone to get…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet aligning them efficiently and effectively with human expectations remains a critical challenge. This thesis advances LLM alignment by introducing novel…