Related papers: Gradient-Free Noise Optimization for Reward Alignm…
Aligning diffusion models to downstream tasks often requires finetuning new models or gradient-based guidance at inference time to enable sampling from the reward-tilted posterior. In this work, we explore a simple inference-time…
Direct preference optimization (DPO) has shown success in aligning diffusion models with human preference. Previous approaches typically assume a consistent preference label between final generations and noisy samples at intermediate steps,…
The development of nonlinear optimization algorithms capable of performing reliably in the presence of noise has garnered considerable attention lately. This paper advocates for strategies to create noise-tolerant nonlinear optimization…
The increasing computational and memory demands in deep learning present significant challenges, especially in resource-constrained environments. We introduce a zero-order quantized optimization (ZOQO) method designed for training models…
Recent progress in robust statistical learning has mainly tackled convex problems, like mean estimation or linear regression, with non-convex challenges receiving less attention. Phase retrieval exemplifies such a non-convex problem,…
Bridging the gap between diffusion models and human preferences is crucial for their integration into practical generative workflows. While optimizing downstream reward models has emerged as a promising alignment strategy, concerns arise…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or verifiable rewards (RLVR), the standard paradigm for aligning LLMs or building recent SOTA reasoning models, is highly sensitive to noise from inconsistent or erroneous rewards. Yet, the…
Gradient-free optimizers allow for tackling problems regardless of the smoothness or differentiability of their objective function, but they require many more iterations to converge when compared to gradient-based algorithms. This has made…
Zeroth-order or derivative-free optimization (MeZO) is an attractive strategy for finetuning large language models (LLMs) because it eliminates the memory overhead of backpropagation. However, it converges slowly due to the inherent curse…
Recovering high-dimensional statistical structure from limited measurements is a fundamental challenge in hyperspectral imaging, where capturing full-resolution data is often infeasible due to sensor, bandwidth, or acquisition constraints.…
We present Zeno, a technique to make distributed machine learning, particularly Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), tolerant to an arbitrary number of faulty workers. Zeno generalizes previous results that assumed a majority of non-faulty…
Diffusion-based large language models offer a non-autoregressive alternative for text generation, but enabling them to perform complex reasoning remains challenging. Reinforcement learning has recently emerged as an effective post-training…
We propose Diffusion Noise Optimization (DNO), a new method that effectively leverages existing motion diffusion models as motion priors for a wide range of motion-related tasks. Instead of training a task-specific diffusion model for each…
Discrete diffusion models have demonstrated great promise in modeling various sequence data, ranging from human language to biological sequences. Inspired by the success of RL in language models, there is growing interest in further…
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally relies on costly training and human preference annotations. Self-alignment seeks to reduce these expenses by enabling models to align themselves. To further lower costs and achieve…
In this study, we consider an optimization problem with uncertainty dependent on decision variables, which has recently attracted attention due to its importance in machine learning and pricing applications. In this problem, the gradient of…
In this paper, a gradient-free distributed algorithm is introduced to solve a set constrained optimization problem under a directed communication network. Specifically, at each time-step, the agents locally compute a so-called…
Recent advances in one-step text-to-image generation have enabled real-time synthesis with remarkable efficiency and quality. Previous reinforcement learning methods for one-step generators combine image-space reward optimization with…
Diffusion models, which iteratively denoise data samples to synthesize high-quality outputs, have achieved empirical success across domains. However, optimizing these models for downstream tasks often involves nested bilevel structures,…
DeepSeek-R1 has successfully enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning capabilities through its rule-based reward system. While it's a ''perfect'' reward system that effectively mitigates reward hacking, such reward functions are often…