Related papers: Does Your Optimizer Care How You Normalize? Normal…

Benign overfitting refers to how over-parameterized neural networks can fit training data perfectly and generalize well to unseen data. While this has been widely investigated theoretically, existing works are limited to two-layer networks…

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong alignment through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback, the alignment is often fragile under subsequent fine-tuning. Existing explanations either…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a cornerstone technique for post-training large language models. While most existing approaches rely on the reverse KL-regularization, recent empirical studies have begun…

Vision Transformers (ViTs), such as DINOv2, achieve strong performance across domains but often repurpose low-informative patch tokens in ways that reduce the interpretability of attention and feature maps. This challenge is especially…

Batch Normalization (BN) has been used extensively in deep learning to achieve faster training process and better resulting models. However, whether BN works strongly depends on how the batches are constructed during training and it may not…

Over-parameterized deep networks trained using gradient-based optimizers are a popular choice for solving classification and ranking problems. Without appropriately tuned $\ell_2$ regularization or weight decay, such networks have the…

Mode collapse remains a fundamental challenge in training generative adversarial networks (GANs). While existing works have primarily focused on inter-mode collapse, such as mode dropping, intra-mode collapse-where many latent variables map…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has advanced alignment capabilities significantly but remains hindered by two core challenges: \textbf{reward hacking} and \textbf{stable optimization}. Current solutions independently…

Scaling laws have made language-model performance predictable from model size, data, and compute, but they typically treat the optimizer as a fixed training detail. We show that this assumption misses a fundamental axis of representation…

The ability to generalize to unseen domains is crucial for machine learning systems deployed in the real world, especially when we only have data from limited training domains. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective regularization…

The Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great success on a variety of computer vision tasks, however, they are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To address this problem, we propose to improve the local smoothness of the…

Linearization has emerged as a strategy for developing efficient language models (LMs). Starting from an existing Transformer-based LM, linearization replaces the attention component with computationally efficient subquadratic \textit{token…

Vision-language alignment in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). To align multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage, supervised…

Normalization techniques are a boon for modern deep learning. They let weights converge more quickly with often better generalization performances. It has been argued that the normalization-induced scale invariance among the weights…

We investigate the learning dynamics of classifiers in scenarios where classes are separable or classifiers are over-parameterized. In both cases, Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) results in zero training error. However, there are many…

Language models have improved by orders of magnitude with the recent emergence of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs have demonstrated their ability to generate natural code that is highly similar to code written by…

Machine unlearning has been used to remove unwanted knowledge acquired by large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we examine machine unlearning from an optimization perspective, framing it as a regularized multi-task optimization…

The large language model (LLM) is typically integrated into the mainstream optimization protocol. No work has questioned whether maintaining the model integrity is \textit{indispensable} for promising performance. In this work, we introduce…

Length generalization, the ability to solve problems longer than those seen during training, remains a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). Previous work modifies positional encodings (PEs) and data formats to improve length…

Recent studies have shown that high disparities in effective learning rates (ELRs) across layers in deep neural networks can negatively affect trainability. We formalize how these disparities evolve over time by modeling weight dynamics…