Related papers: ROAST: Rollout-based On-distribution Activation St…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong performance as zero-shot rankers, yet their effectiveness is highly sensitive to prompt formulation, particularly role-play instructions. Prior analyses suggest that role-related…

A major bottleneck in the real-world applications of machine learning models is their failure in generalizing to unseen domains whose data distribution is not i.i.d to the training domains. This failure often stems from learning…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making contexts. While prior work has shown that LLMs exhibit cognitive biases behaviorally, whether these biases correspond to identifiable internal…

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,…

Dispatching mobile resources such as repair crews and mobile emergency generators is essential for the rapid restoration of distribution systems after extreme events. However, the restoration process is affected by various uncertain factors…

Large language models (LLMs) transcend passive generation and act as goal-directed agents by invoking external tools. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled framework for optimizing these emergent tool-use policies, yet the…

Activation steering controls LLM behaviour towards target behaviour by intervening in internal representations, yet it often degrades reasoning and retrieval performance. We argue that a primary cause of this trade-off is attention…

The efficient Test-Time Scaling (TTS) paradigm offers a promising perspective for enhancing the generation performance of diffusion models. However, current solutions are limited to a static, pre-defined noise pool and suffer from…

This paper presents a novel storage aware routing (STAR) protocol designed to provide a general networking solution over a broad range of wired and wireless usage scenarios. STAR enables routing policies which adapt seamlessly from a…

Advances in large language models (LLMs) are driving a shift toward using reinforcement learning (RL) to train agents from iterative, multi-turn interactions across tasks. However, multi-turn RL remains challenging as rewards are often…

This paper discusses distributed optimization over a directed graph. We begin with some well known algorithms which achieve consensus among agents including FROST [1], which possesses the quickest convergence to the optimum. It is a well…

This paper formalizes an emerging learning paradigm that uses a trained model as a reference to guide and enhance the training of a target model through strategic data selection or weighting, named $\textbf{model steering}$. While ad-hoc…

Discrete Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising non-autoregressive alternative for text generation, yet effective mechanisms for inference-time control remain relatively underexplored. Existing approaches include sampling-level…

Inference-time intervention (ITI) has emerged as a promising method for steering large language model (LLM) behavior in a particular direction (e.g., improving helpfulness) by intervening on token representations without costly updates to…

Large language models (LLMs) can memorize and reproduce training sequences verbatim -- a tendency that undermines both generalization and privacy. Existing mitigation methods apply interventions uniformly, degrading performance on the…

Energy-based models (EBMs) have gained popularity for controlled text generation due to their high applicability to a wide range of constraints. However, sampling from EBMs is non-trivial, as it often requires a large number of iterations…

We consider the problem of data-driven stochastic optimal control of an unknown LTI dynamical system. Assuming the process noise is normally distributed, we pose the problem of steering the state's mean and covariance to a target normal…

Autonomous off-road driving is challenging as risky actions taken by the robot may lead to catastrophic damage. As such, developing controllers in simulation is often desirable as it provides a safer and more economical alternative.…

Boosting has attracted much research attention in the past decade. The success of boosting algorithms may be interpreted in terms of the margin theory. Recently it has been shown that generalization error of classifiers can be obtained by…

Vision-language model (VLM) based GUI agents show promise for automating complex desktop and mobile tasks, but face significant challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL): (1) slow multi-turn interactions with GUI environments for…