Related papers: Beyond Inference-Time Search: Reinforcement Learni…

Distilling the tool-using capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient small language models (SLMs) is a key challenge for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT),…

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore…

We introduce Reward-Guided Speculative Decoding (RSD), a novel framework aimed at improving the efficiency of inference in large language models (LLMs). RSD synergistically combines a lightweight draft model with a more powerful target…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as evaluators, offering a scalable alternative to human annotation. However, existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches often fall short in domains that demand complex reasoning.…

Adapting large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) is often bottlenecked by the generation stage, which can consume over 75\% of the training time. Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive generation in…

Best-of-N sampling is a powerful method for improving Large Language Model (LLM) performance, but it is often limited by its dependence on massive, text-based reward models. These models are not only computationally expensive but also…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a goal-oriented learning solution that has proven to be successful for Neural Architecture Search (NAS) on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets. However, a limitation of this approach is its high computational…

Sampling is ubiquitous in machine learning methodologies. Due to the growth of large datasets and model complexity, we want to learn and adapt the sampling process while training a representation. Towards achieving this grand goal, a…

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable abilities by integrating large language models with visual inputs. However, they often fail to utilize visual evidence adequately, either depending on linguistic priors in vision-centric…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a computational approach to reward-driven learning in sequential decision problems. It implements the discovery of optimal actions by learning from an agent interacting with an environment rather than from…

Large language models (LLMs) deployed as agents solve user-specified tasks over multiple steps while keeping the required manual engagement to a minimum. Crucially, such LLMs need to ground their generations in any feedback obtained to…

Model-free deep-reinforcement-based learning algorithms have been applied to a range of COPs~\cite{bello2016neural}~\cite{kool2018attention}~\cite{nazari2018reinforcement}. However, these approaches suffer from two key challenges when…

Industrial sponsored search system (SSS) can be logically divided into three modules: keywords matching, ad retrieving, and ranking. During ad retrieving, the ad candidates grow exponentially. A query with high commercial value might…

Although recent model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of mastering complicated decision-making tasks, the sample complexity of these methods has remained a hurdle to utilizing them in many real-world…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) often consume excessive tokens, inflating computational cost and latency. More broadly, in goal reaching sequential decision problems we often want to reach the goal quickly, and LRM reasoning can be viewed…

Engineering problems that are modeled using sophisticated mathematical methods or are characterized by expensive-to-conduct tests or experiments, are encumbered with limited budget or finite computational resources. Moreover, practical…

Modern large language models (LLMs) are often evaluated and deployed under a one-shot, greedy inference protocol, especially in professional settings that require deterministic behavior. This regime can systematically under-estimate a fixed…

Inference-time computation is a powerful paradigm to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs), with Best-of-N sampling being a widely used technique. However, this method is computationally expensive, requiring both (1) an…

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) typically relies on massive computational resources and extensive datasets, limiting accessibility for resource-constrained settings. Our study investigates the potential…

The epidemic failure of replicability across empirical science and machine learning has recently motivated the formal study of replicable learning algorithms [Impagliazzo et al. (2022)]. In batch settings where data comes from a fixed…