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Dake Bu

5 accepted papers

2026

Provable Sample Efficiency of Curriculum Post-Training for Transformer Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Recent curriculum techniques in the post-training stage of LLMs have been empirically observed to outperform non-curriculum approaches in improving reasoning performance, yet a principled understanding of their effectiveness and limitations remains incomplete. To bridge this gap, we develop an abstr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Multi-objective Linear Reinforcement Learning with Lexicographic Rewards

ICML 2025poster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with linear transition kernels and reward functions has recently attracted growing attention due to its computational efficiency and theoretical advancements. However, prior theoretical research in RL has primarily focused on single-objective problems, resulting in limite…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Provable In-Context Vector Arithmetic via Retrieving Task Concepts

ICML 2025poster

In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent **task/function vector** in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed that LLMs leverage this vector alongside the residual s…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Provably Neural Active Learning Succeeds via Prioritizing Perplexing Samples

ICML 2024poster

Neural Network-based active learning (NAL) is a cost-effective data selection technique that utilizes neural networks to select and train on a small subset of samples. While existing work successfully develops various effective or theory-justified NAL algorithms, the understanding of the two commonl…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Provably Transformers Harness Multi-Concept Word Semantics for Efficient In-Context Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their in-context learning (ICL) capacity, allowing them to solve n…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar