Related papers: Gradient-Free Noise Optimization for Reward Alignm…
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects from a given unnormalized reward distribution. They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects,…
We identify and formalize an underexplored phenomenon in deep learning optimization: directional alignment and loss convergence can be decoupled. An optimizer can exhibit near-perfect directional consistency (cc_t -> 1, measured via…
Model-free and reinforcement learning-based adaptive filtering methods are gaining traction for denoising in dynamic, non-stationary environments such as wireless signal channels. Traditional filters like LMS, RLS, Wiener, and Kalman are…
Recent advancements adopt online reinforcement learning (RL) from LLMs to text-to-image rectified flow diffusion models for reward alignment. The use of group-level rewards successfully aligns the model with the targeted reward. However, it…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is widely used to handle challenging tasks, such as query-based black-box adversarial attacks and reinforcement learning. Various attempts have been made to integrate prior information into the gradient…
Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…
Newtonian noise in gravitational wave detectors originates from density fluctuations in the adjacency of the interferometer mirrors. At the Einstein Telescope, this noise source is expected to be dominant for low frequencies. Its impact is…
Zeroth-Order Optimization (ZOO) provides powerful tools for optimizing functions where explicit gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. However, the underlying mechanisms of popular ZOO methods, particularly those employing…
Near term quantum processors operate in a noise dominated regime, motivating error mitigation techniques that recover accurate expectation values without full fault tolerance. Zero Noise Extrapolation (ZNE) is a widely used but biased error…
Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising solution for fine-tuning LLMs under strict memory constraints, as it avoids the prohibitive memory cost of storing activations for backpropagation. However, existing ZO methods…
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have been introduced as a method to sample a diverse set of candidates with probabilities proportional to a given reward. However, GFlowNets can only be used with a predefined scalar reward, which can be…
Score-based diffusion models have emerged as effective approaches for both conditional and unconditional generation. Still conditional generation is based on either a specific training of a conditional model or classifier guidance, which…
Recent work uses reinforcement learning (RL) to fine-tune text-to-image diffusion models, improving text-image alignment and sample quality. However, existing approaches introduce unnecessary complexity: they cache the full sampling…
A common recipe to improve diffusion models at test-time so that samples score highly against a user-specified reward is to introduce the gradient of the reward into the dynamics of the diffusion itself. This procedure is often ill posed,…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their performance can be severely degraded by noisy or corrupted training data. Conventional noise mitigation methods often rely on explicit…
This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…
Diffusion models and flow matching have become a cornerstone of robotic imitation learning, yet they suffer from a structural inefficiency where inference is often bound to a fixed integration schedule that is agnostic to state complexity.…
In this paper, we present a policy gradient method that avoids exploratory noise injection and performs policy search over the deterministic landscape. By avoiding noise injection all sources of estimation variance can be eliminated in…
Fine-tuning large pretrained language models (LLMs) is a cornerstone of modern NLP, yet its growing memory demands (driven by backpropagation and large optimizer States) limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Zero-order (ZO)…